


Ordinary People

by clementizing



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF, Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Armie does not have kids, Armie is single, M/M, Memories, Second Person, Timmy POV, at least he is until the fateful day he meets Timmy, happy endings, minor AU - Armie is not married, non-linear timeline, this is a can't-live-without-each-other story, trust me this is not a break-up story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-06-13 22:58:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15375276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clementizing/pseuds/clementizing
Summary: "You put your lips into his hair, silky and damp with sweat, breathed,what will we do when the press tour is over?It must have seemed a strange moment to ask, when you had months of it still to come, when you had the hours rolled out before you like the fields of lemon groves in Italy that seemed to skim the limits of eternity. In a feast of time, why stop to think about the famine?"Armie once said during an interview, "I loved that the only antagonist in this film is time". This is a story which asks: what if it was the same for Armie and Timmy?





	1. Best Light

**Author's Note:**

> I never really intended to write a multi-chapter story, or an RPF story, but these boys had other ideas...22,000 words later, here we are! The story has nine chapters and, despite literally being the slowest writer in the universe, I have written seven of them, so I should be able to stick to a regular posting schedule.
> 
> In case any of you prefer not to read this kind of thing, please note that this story is set in the context of Armie and Timmy breaking up. However, it's not a story about them being apart from each other - it's a story about them finding their way back to each other. It will be an angsty ride, but I hope you'll enjoy it. It's told from Timmy's point of view, and it begins, as always, on a film set one summer in Crema...

He found you in the eaves of the villa one night when the sunset was beginning, with the photos spread around you, lined up neatly in rows. It had cost you fifty euros and half an hour lost in translation with a half-grasp of Italian to get them developed, but it was worth it to see them on something other than the screen of a phone.

"What've you got there?" he asked. 

He wasn't looking at all of the pictures, only the one you had privately hoped he wouldn't notice. Already he had a habit of doing that: seeing things that you were eager to hide.

"Oh, that one just...probably an accident."

You've never been very good at bluffing. Strange for an actor.

He didn't say anything to that. There was only the creak of the old building settling in on itself comfortably, then his breathing, then yours. You realised he was waiting for you to tell the truth. His presence was like a child in the house of your mind, pulling up floorboards, not prying, but peeking beneath in search of golden things.

"It's just silly. Stupid," you said.

The other photos were like a thousand other holiday shots, generic: sunsets, the gardens, him and Luca raising glasses of wine for the camera after a night shoot. The picture you were both looking at was different, it didn't belong, and in the end you lost it, somewhere in the smouldering ashes of the summer. It was a shot of a narrow valley of tangled brackens on the edge of the plot of land the villa was built on, wild and overgrown, boxed in by a half-tumbled down wall on the other side so that it scarcely ever caught the sun. You all joked about it. The single flaw in the diamond. We'll photoshop it out. 

"It was in its best light."

Your voice was so quiet he said huh, I didn't catch that, so it wasn't too late to back track, say something flippant, say something less earnest. You didn't know each other very well then, he might not understand, he might be inclined to judge: the LA import, so clean, so professional, and you the unproven theatre kid, spouting lines that were like something out of a bad high school art project; there was no telling what he would make of them, whether aloud or in the privacy of his head. But in the end you said them anyway.

"It's ugly," you said, "It is. But for just a moment it got the last of the sunset and it was...better. Hopeful. It was in its best light." 

He had come a lot closer, you realised. On the wall there was your shadow cross-legged on the floor and melded into it, the long rising stem of his where he stood directly behind you. 

"I told you it was stupid," you said.

"No," he replied, "I don't think that at all."

He could have been saying it just to be polite, but it had a certain tone to it: lower, inviting. Trustworthy.

Probably you loved him even then.

*

Gradually you fell into routines together. There was the cafe you always stopped at in the morning for coffee, the route you always walked into town so you caught the best of the sun and the prettiest of the views, the gelateria you always went to for ice cream. One night the humidity was so cloying that it had all but driven you there, desperate for evidence that coldness still existed, cutting in through the door just before they closed.

On the way back, distracted, talking to him, your conversations starting to open up at the edges, ascending in their own direction, you neglected yours for a minute too long and watched the whole thing slide in one thick wave onto the sidewalk, leaving you staring into the empty mouth of the cone, open like an "oh" of surprise.

"My pistachio..."

You were taken aback by the childlike dismay of it, and there was embarrassment too: you were waiting for him to laugh. When he did it was warm laughter, fond, not mocking like you were worrying about. He never was; you were learning that.

"Here," he said, "you can have mine."

You didn't know why but it flustered you somehow, the ease he said it with, the wide open lines of his body limned under the streetlight, his best light, though really they all were when you were as beautiful as him. You were surprised the bulb was still glowing; so much of the brightness seemed to be in his eyes. 

"No, it's, thank you but it's okay."

"I'm serious," he said, "It's my fault anyway. It was me who kept asking you questions, distracting you."

"Thank you," you said, "Oliver."

He tilted his head to one side. Now you know that look so well: it means don't try and make this less than it is, and if you do I won't let you. But of course you knew nothing then, you didn't know the bull strength of his stubbornness, you didn't know that when he pulled you into one of his big bear hugs it would feel like he had looked every cruel thing in the world in the eye and told it to go, to go and never come back, leaving only the kindness behind, which he owned divinely, because no one could ever be kinder than him. You didn't know the feeling of his hands in yours. They were too big to be graceful; he always had to make them gentle instead. All these little strengths, all these little frailties. Still to come.

"You know, you have a habit of doing that," he said.

"Doing what?"

"Brushing it away when I'm nice to you. Making light of it. And then you just go off somewhere in your head."

You had no idea what to say. In your head right then, there was only void, blank, spotlight.

"I...I don't know what you're trying to say."

It was the best you could do, turn it around on him instead.

"I'm saying I mean it," he said, "When I'm nice to you, I just mean it."

"People don't usually say things like that."

"Maybe not. But if I don't, you're not going to know."

Without a second's thought, you shot the line out at him.

"And you want me to know?"

He smiled. Then he took his ice cream cone and put a wet smudge of it on your nose, precisely, teasing before he put it in your hand. It made you smile back, a big smile, buoyant, no choice in the matter. You couldn't remember the last time you had played around like that. 

"Don't let that one melt too," he said, and started walking again.

*

In the early days you had worked your share of projects that were exhausting, laborious, up at 3am to catch the light at the right time, then it was twelve, sixteen hours on set, rinse, repeat, take your pay check, find another just like it. That summer was different, it was easy. The only thing that ever hurt you were the long days riding bikes in thin shoes, or else the hot stone cobbles under your feet hour after hour until the soles felt burnt and parched, aching.

He was stretched out on the couch reading his script, so tall that he took up the whole thing, the flow of the fabric contoured around the hard lines of his body. That was one of the things you envied him right from the start, how he would take up space so grandly, unapologetic. There couldn't have been any room for you at all, but when you went to sit down there was, somehow. He always did that, always made space for you. 

He watched you for a while, watched you with one knee up under your chin, kneading the ball of your foot where the burn felt the worst. Then he put his script down, put his hands out, said, come here. You remember the way his fingers were warm but still cooled your irritated skin down, the way his hands together enveloped your foot completely, working up the seam along the centre of the sole to cup the ball and squeeze.

"I can't just get a nose bleed on cue," you said.

Old habits. He gave you the head tilt. Then he rested the heel of your foot on his chest and smoothed the skin over and over with his fingertips, sympathetic; reached for the other one, starting all over again.

"You're sure you don't mind?" you asked.

"Why would I mind?"

"Most people don't like feet."

"Well, I'm not usually enamoured," he said, amused. He pressed his knuckles into the arch of your foot, rolled them slowly, deliberately back and forth until all the tension bled out of the muscles. "But yours are cute."

That made your toes scrunch up on themselves, shy. He kissed them, just the once.

"I think they're weird," you said.

Your other foot was still tucked safely against his ribs, so you felt the way he took a deep breath, air swelling like his lungs were the sail of a ship.

"All of you is perfectly fine," he told you. 

You liked the way he said it: intensely, from his chest, stern almost. 

Perhaps that was what made you crawl up the length of him then, into the narrow valley of space he had made between his body and the back of the couch, where sunlight pooled that was perfect for basking in. He was already used to your restless energy, he absorbed it like light. It only ever made him more still, more steady, made for leaning on: hand on his thigh, hand on his hip, hand on his chest as you climbed, and his arm already held out for you. When you lay down he closed the gap so that the sunlight fell over him instead, taking your whole weight whilst you settled on him. You nuzzled your head into the neat space beneath his neck, discovered that you fitted well there, clenched the fingers of one hand into the neckline of his green Oliver shirt and tugged. There was a small sound trapped in the back of your throat which fought its way out and when it did he held you properly, tight.

Every one of his breaths made you rise, fall, rise, and again, again, steady. Something to rely on. You had your newly cute feet buried in the warmth beneath his thighs. Later you would often rest like this with him, but then it seemed so novel, daring almost, to you at least. He was more relaxed, as if he had been expecting you for a long time. After a while he picked up his script again and read it whilst he cradled you, smoothing the hair back from your forehead. Perfectly fine, he had said. But you felt just perfect.

*

Some days when the rain fell long and flat and drenching it seemed to wash your mood away with it. He called it youthful angst: as soon as he saw that look on your face, he was there, gleeful, throwing his arm around your shoulders, pulling you in close to his skin.

"Here he is," he said, "Another day in the tortured life of Timothée Hal Chalamet. What is it this time, the plight of the whales? Or did they just spell your name wrong on your Starbucks cup?"

You shrugged him off, no heat in it.

"As if they even have a Starbucks around here," you said.

Of course, it never really mattered that he teased you. When you talked to him about the things that were on your mind, he stopped no matter what he was doing and listened. You knew when he was listening to you because the light in his eyes softened. It didn't do that when he was listening to anyone else.

*

One night - syrupy outside again, slick with the anticipation of rain - he came to your apartment, late, when you were both supposed to be sleeping. He didn't come at midnight. That would be cliché. Your bed was pure white, you remember that, and the fan on the ceiling made the air cool in a way that felt like it should be white too. In the moonlight, it all looked blue instead.

In New York if you had heard footsteps outside your door at that hour, you would have been unnerved, you would have felt the particular brand of loneliness that can only come when you're surrounded by millions of people and none of them know that you might be in trouble. In Crema it was different, safe, you trusted the streets, the lights, even the darkness. In Crema you never felt alone. Besides, you would have known the sound of his footsteps anywhere. 

You were curled up in the clean white sheets, starting to chase sleep, hazy, like an animal hibernating. It felt natural for him to see you like that. He didn't upset the line of your body when he came into the bed with you at all; he changed himself instead, became softer, fluid, like the impression of light you sometimes see around people when you are tired and they become blurred at the edges. As soon as he was holding you the hazy feeling spread and trickled in waves down your back, tingling, but you couldn't give in to it until you had fixed something: his fingers on your wrist, tentative. The fact that he hesitated made you smile, made you shimmy your wrist back, fold your hand into his, not the way that couples did when they were walking down the street, showy, saying look at us, together, but the way people did when it really was just us, together. The way your father did when you were a child and he walked alongside you when you learned to ride a bike, the way your mother did when you were sick and she would sit with you in the night. You weren't trying to tell him that it was less than; you were trying to tell him that it was so much more. The angle of his body, languid and relaxed, knew it; the palm of his free hand, lying flat against your chest to feel your heartbeat, knew it. 

You were shaking all over with feeling. He put his lips so close to your ear that you shivered and whispered, it's only me.

*

After that you had a secret, a little flicker of a thing that you could pass from his hands to yours like a flame. It didn't need to be spoken about. What questions could be asked of instinct anyway? Your bodies knew peace together, that was the why of it, and the how is too beautiful to think about even now, it starts an ache behind your eyes as if you're looking into pure light: his arms draped around you, golden, his hands spread all over you, gentle, the soft fur of his belly where it pressed against the valley of your spine. Between laundry days, you would let the bed become saturated with the scent of the summer, of Italy, of him: citrus, the thick vanilla of suntan lotion on his neck, behind his ears, the lazy swell of the warmth on his chest when he woke up.

On some nights the heat would rise so high that jagged forks of lightning splashed outside your room, not tempered by thunder or rain. Then you would sleep naked with only his hands to shelter you, fragile, curled against his chest. Your body knew no shame with him; it did not remember how to hide. In the mornings he would treat it as his own, unfurling you like a spring leaf to roll back across the bed with him, arms opening wide, the flex of his ribs under your back like wings. Good morning, he would whisper, contented, then relax, brush his fingertips through your hair, over your chest, into the hollow of your hip, only the thin cotton of his underwear between you, always, even after you had seen all of him on set. He didn't rush with that.

Once in the dawn light he said to you quietly, confessional, I never really thought I would have this with anyone. You couldn't imagine that: someone as bright and alive as him; how could they ever not be wanted, or fear not being wanted? But already it was more than a wanting thing between you, there were thin claws of need tapping out the rhythm of your heartbeat, patient, waiting, whispering let me in, in, in. You thought perhaps he hadn't meant to say it out loud, but when you reached for him he came easily, hid the blush on his face against your neck. At his throat there was his soft space: a patch of stubble that always missed the razor's edge, which you loved, and just above it, a spot where nature had run out of skin whilst making him and traded it for a swatch of good silk instead.

*

Now he still has soft spaces, but they are no longer yours to hold and relish. You know he still has them because you see them, in person sometimes, yes, but more often in magazines, from fleeting glances that are all you can bear before you have to look away. Years ago you read that peripheral vision is just a relic from the past, signalling danger, telling your body to prepare for chaos. You hate to think that he belongs there now, that you've banished him to a world of shadows and half-light where he can never be fully seen. Once it was you who brought him out of the darkness, you who saw the full picture of him, cracked, textured, radiant, painted by your hands as much as by his.

He hadn't come to you a whole person. He was a glorious archeological dig of a man, epic and incomplete; still even now, you'd bet. Sometimes when you discovered a new part of him you would hold it up against the corresponding fragment of yourself and smile at the comfort when you found they were the same. It would be easier if you could believe now that it was just a trick of the light all along, but you still don't like to think in this way. Even in your head it hurts to be sharp with him. When you were with him people said all the time: I don't want you to get hurt, but you didn't get hurt, did you; you didn't buy it in a shop and pour it into yourself as if it were a poison. So where did it come from? 

You can't think like this. It's time to wake up. Time to ask questions later. You're not in Crema, you're not warm in that languid liquid sunlight, you're not in his arms. You're alone in your apartment in New York. Rare these days. Normally it's a set, a shoot, a press tour, a hotel somewhere, just stopping by, can't stay long. Always a reason to say goodbye. You don't have what you want, but you have other things, other people, the bare bones of a wonderful life. You have family that care, family that is close. You have friends, some from your old life and some from Hollywood, and you're smart enough to know when there's a difference in value between them. In a manner of speaking, you still even have him. Friends, he'd said, please. Although he'd used other words, there had been a lot more pain, you can't afford to sink into it now, when there are things to do, places to be.

Instead, you nudge the time line along just a little and think about standing outside the hotel room with him that last time. He'd had his bag over his shoulder, full of all the little pieces of himself that he was taking away with him. He was keeping his hands busy, you'd noticed, because whenever he didn't they started to shake. Meanwhile you had been still, quiet, like a stone when it gets to the bottom of a lake. The click of the door closing behind you was solid, conclusive. Final. 

"How do we do it?" you'd asked, desperately, as if it were a trigger. "How can we be friends?"

He'd smiled, not his usual smile but something that was trying to be, and looked around to make sure you were alone. Then he took your hand, palm up, and when you understood and held it out for him, he rested his chin in it, the way he always did when he was upset.

"After all this, Timmy," he said, "after all this, how can we not be?"


	2. The Sleep of The Gods

The night before Sundance the hotel had made a mess of things. 

"Interconnecting doors," the concierge explained apologetically. She gestured between you and him. "Is that all right?"

You had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from smiling. Since filming you'd stayed in touch, stayed close, even stayed with each other, but never in bed like before, although there had been moments, dazzling sparks of hesitation where you'd thought, I want to, he wants to, I know it, why don't we. Yet still you hadn't.

At 2am you prowled into his half of the divide, like an alley cat twining around the ankles of an indulgent onlooker. Your body felt wired, edgy, purposeful. Hour after hour that night you had heard him in there, so close, so far. In the end it was the scent of his uncertainty that had made you go to him; it was like a siren call to you, it was your job to smooth it, to soothe the rough edges away.

"You didn't want to come in?" you said, quiet. Your voice had a cutting edge to it, but not from cruelty. Something else instead. 

"No, I did. I just - I do."

He was in bed and the room was dark, but you knew he hadn't slept. When he sat up - fully clothed, a pity - his eyes looked deeper than they ever had, caught in an otherworldly silver light that made him look very young to you. He was no less lovely for it. Neither of you moved to switch on the light. There was just the sound of his breathing and yours, and the sheets rumpling as you got into bed with him.

"Hey," he said, when you were sitting next to each other.

"Hi," you breathed back. Then you said, "You didn't sleep yet."

"No," he agreed.

"Were you waiting?" 

"Hoping," he said softly, and folded you into his arms. Somehow you had forgotten the size of him, and his particular brand of warmth, and the feeling of the memories rushing back to mingle with the reality made you moan into his chest. He tugged at your sweater.

"Come out of all this," he murmured, "I miss..."

He didn't have to say the rest. He missed skin, you knew that, he missed the way sleep would stick your bare skin together in the night so that in the morning you had to peel apart like two halves of a whole. Often he would lull himself to sleep by stroking up and down your spine, the touch growing deeper and dreamier as tiredness caught up with him. You missed it too. When you were topless he drew a long line with one fingertip from the nape of your neck until it slid into the base of your spine. He let out a breath when he got there, as if he had thought that he might not be allowed to touch you like that any more. Then he held you the way you liked best: him on his back, huge, and you nuzzled in at his side, legs curled up to rest mostly on top of him. One arm wrapped low around your back, so that the span of his hand covered you from the back of your hip to the top of your thigh. The intimacy of it, once so easy to you, was almost shocking now that it was new again.

You nuzzled into his shoulder, waited. Silence. But the air felt alive, introductory, he was going somewhere, you were sure of it. He swallowed. Your heart was beating against his side like the wings of a butterfly, light, thrumming. You knew he could feel it.

"I'm not mad with you," you said, to reassure him. 

He laughed softly.

"You're so pure, I think I'd love to see you get angry," he said. The look on his face was fond, then something gentler than that. He kissed your forehead, touched his thumb to your cheek. "The world would be a much nicer place if there were more people like you in it."

That made you blush, hot and bright. No one had ever called it pure before. Usually people spoke about it as if it were an ailment, something slightly dirty: oh yes, Timmy. He's - whisper it - a little sensitive. The words on your first grade school report had been accusatory, diagnostic: Timothée is of a very sensitive disposition. You'd found the class goldfish dead in the glass bubble of its tank one morning and wept until your mother had been called to take you home. You could laugh about it now, but the truth was that a part of your fabric that was so brightly stitched and vital had been apologising for itself ever since, silently bargaining in every crowded room, I'll be better, I'll try harder, if you just let me fit in. He was the first person to ever speak about it as if it were others who were lacking, rather than you. You burrowed into his shoulder like you wanted to climb under his skin and take root there.

"I know I've been slow about this," he said.

"This?" 

You wanted to hear him say it.

"Us," he replied easily. You buried your smile in the crook of his neck. "I just wanted you to feel sure." He looked at you, put one fingertip under your chin and cradled it there. "Are you sure?"

You nodded and nodded and nodded until he copied you, nodding back, playing. When you both started laughing he scooped you up and let you wriggle all of your nervous tension out in his arms, crushing it into his skin. Then he nuzzled his way to your ear, gentle. He said, come for dinner with me. On set you had been like family; there had been endless days where you ate every meal together, but you knew it meant something different then. It was the start of things, the sound of a thousand doors unlocking.

"Yes," you said, "yeah. We should - we should do that."

In the darkness he pulled your hand to his mouth and kissed it.

*

Outside the restaurant he stood under the awnings, where the shadows drew in like a cloak. It did nothing to hide him. Two girls walking past pierced him with conspiratorial, we know who you are looks, their gazes long and sticky. He gave them an affable smile back, half-shrugging as if to say, well, you've got me there, then favoured both with a mildly appraising glance so they would have something to tell their friends about. When they were gone he didn't look after them the way he would have done if he'd meant it. He always was good at playing his roles.

You tried to see him through their eyes. For a moment it worked and he was born of another age, something from the Golden Era: the strong bow mouth, the intense cloudless blue of his eyes, that steel-cut masterpiece of a jaw line. Broad everywhere, shoulders, back, chest, the long moody line of his shadow spilling around him. Then something else kicked in and there was his restless tick of rolling his watch up and down his wrist, his eyes a little more brooding than usual because you had stayed up together the night before, talking until dawn. He must have been tired. One of those so-strong shoulders had a birthmark he hated, though he had never needed to tell you that. You knew because when he first came to bed with you he had always kept it from view, and when your fingers had found it once you had felt him tense suddenly. When you didn't let him shy from you, when you held your hand firm instead, then he had melted slowly into acceptance. After that he would yield the marred skin to you often for your approval, which you always gave with your touch but sometimes, in moments of overflowing affection, by tracing it with your lips.

He looked up and saw you, smiled.

"Quit staring," he said lightly, like it was no big deal. But he blushed, all the same.

*

It was his room that had the better view of the city: a blurry panoply of lights hanging low on the horizon like a halo.

"It's pretty," you said, looking out at it, face close to the glass. You could see a little ghost reflection of yourself in there, wide-eyed and hopeful. He splayed one hand on the glass window, just to the right of you, then his other hand just to the left, his height behind you putting a comfort blanket between your body and what little light there was in the room. Then he leaned in, slow, deliberate, and brushed his lips over the nape of your neck, as if he were delivering a secret so delicate that it could only travel safely on the soft current of his breath. 

"I want to kiss you," he said.

Later you would think that it was a Hollywood sort of moment. So too was the kiss: what started softly hesitant became longer, deeper, unending as he wrapped around you, half out of his t-shirt already where you were tugging at the fabric, his neck and shoulder painted a deep golden in the darkness. But in bed with him that first time, it wasn't the kind of sex people had in magazines, or movies, even. In the past you had read things, heard things, stories about what he was like, an ex-girlfriend who he had neatly divested of her old flame by telling her outright to end it. You didn't think you had ever met that person; you didn't think that was the same man who bowed his head to a cluster of freckles on the inside of your shoulder, licked them and murmured raggedly I love these; whose hands were unsteady when he unbuttoned your shirt; who looked you in the eye when he put his weight, his hands, his mouth on you with a question there, a question that said, is this okay for you, am I okay for you. You knew he hadn't before, you'd asked him once, drunk, playful, come on, have you ever, with a guy. It didn't matter. You didn't want to guide him, you didn't want to tell him what was right, you only wanted to know what his instinct looked like, felt like, tasted like, sounded like when it made you gasp in his ear. 

When you were undressed, he didn't cover you with his heat right away. Instead he pulled back, let your burning skin breathe, traced his fingertips down your throat, scattered touches that fell like cool rain where the edges of your skin blended against the bedsheets. Look at you, he whispered, look at you. He said it the way people did when they held precious artefacts up to the light, freshly unearthed, full of wonder. It was only then that he pushed down the last barrier between you, let you see him before he sunk down onto you, slowly, wholly, covering you. The way you moaned; with anyone else you would have felt ashamed of the hunger in it, but not with him. Yes, he said, tasted it from your mouth with his tongue, kissed your neck where you were soft, soft, soft for him.

His body felt so different than it had on set, where, for all of its beauty, it was split out into parts for make up and lighting and scrutiny and told how to react. Suddenly you had the whole of him and he was a myriad of intricacies, unpredictable, every nerve connected and incendiary, the flick of a tongue over one nipple making the lean muscles in his stomach flutter, his hand twisting in the sheets from feather-light touches along the smooth sweep of his spine. There was a patch of skin like velvet on the inside of one thigh which, when you traced it with a fingertip on a whim, made him groan and snap his eyes closed. No reason why it should be particularly sensitive other than that it was his body, unique, with its own miracles of feeling. Perfect. 

You thought about what a cliche it was, two co-stars meeting on set, falling for each other, the stuff of hot gossip and cheap thrills. You thought about how it wasn't any of those things, how it wasn't cheap at all, how it was the most extravagant luxury of your life. Then you said, please, come here, come here now, and you reached into the drawer and pressed the lube into his hand. Nothing else, you didn't talk about using protection, not then, not ever; it would have been laughable, impossible, the thought of you risking each other. Right from the start, it was that kind of trust.

You still haven't forgotten the sound he made when he was inside you, that sound of unbearable softness, that sound of someone feeling something new, something that felt good, for the first time. It made your heart squeeze in your chest as if that was where he had entered you and you felt the map of his skin for the change in texture on his shoulder, found it, kneaded your fingers into it to remind him that it was you, that you already knew all of his soft spaces and so it was okay if he couldn't keep himself in the lines like he always tried to do, okay if he couldn't be good, okay if he was messy and spilling over. I don't want to hurt you, he said, kissing you, biting the words out; by then it was getting so hard to think, so hard to speak with anything other than your bodies. You shook your head to reassure him, kept your fingers stroking through his hair over and over. You didn't care about pain. If there was pain your body would make a banquet of it; if there was pain then it was something to be relished, like all the other parts of loving him. But in the end there was no pain, pain didn't come into it at all, there was only pleasure that started so softly, like a ripple in the centre of a lake, and blended out and out until you could feel the heat of relief marbling with the sweat on his skin, until your body claimed and demanded him, until it washed you both away in long, exquisite waves that couldn't be stopped and then wouldn't stop, endless and divine.

When at last it was over you didn't let him go. You had waited long enough, and now you would keep him for a while. What you felt was seismic in its power; every pore radiated its own little ray of sun. He lay his head on your chest, reverent, and let you coax his body down from the high with your fingers walking the valley at the nape of his neck over and over, a path often travelled, never tired of. Drenched in the afterglow, you slept together as you had done on so many nights before, but you had never known sleep like it: fathoms deep, dreamless; the sleep of the Gods.


	3. Teeth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And the Academy Award for exes who are really not over each other goes to...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of little things about this chapter:
> 
> \- The line "quid pro quo, Clarice" is a line famously said by Hannibal Lecter to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. It's a great film - if you haven't seen it, go watch that before you read this (and read the books, too)! "Quid pro quo" is a Latin phrase which refers roughly to an exchange of two equivalent things, and is often used as a way of saying, "I'll tell you things if you tell me things".
> 
> \- There was an interview in France during the CMBYN press tour where Armie said that he had spent so much time with Timmy that he sees him in his childhood memories (I may be slightly mis-quoting that, but that's the gist!) The second half of this chapter is a nod to that moment, and features my wildly fictional rationale for why he may have felt that way...
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoy!

Long distance calls make the line pop and crackle with static, the tinny drone of it ringing over and over inviting anxiety like an old friend. Maybe he can't speak now, maybe he won't pick up. Still that endless shrill sound, maddening. Maybe he's doing something else, maybe he's with somebody else. Except you aren't allowed to think that way any more; if there can be a somebody else then that means you're his somebody and you're not. You're not.

Any second now you'll get his voicemail, and - 

"T? T, are you still there?"

There's noise in the background, laughter, the loud rabble of voices climbing over each other, some kind of music threading through the mess. But all you can hear is the smile in his voice.

"Yeah, it's, hi. It's me. Is it a bad time, I can -?"

"No," he says quickly, "no, I'm completely done, just - hang on. Just let me get in a cab."

You can hear the change in the atmosphere when he steps outside; it's the sound of the coldness creeping in, the sound of those crisp October evenings where the air seems to shatter as you step through it. Laced over it there are sirens in the distance, distinctive and immediate to you; you're like a parent who can pick out their child's cry in a room full of babies. He's in New York. Home. 

You don't look around your hotel room. You don't want to see the vapid watercolours of flowers hanging neatly on the relentless expanse of uniform white walls, the TV staring blankly back at you like a vast blind eye. There are no clothes hanging in the closet because you're leaving again in a few days, so what would be the point? He never thought that way; whenever you arrived somewhere new he'd leave his clothes to one side and hang up all of yours, carefully, without asking. You squeeze your eyes tight shut against the memory and imagine being in the cab with him in New York instead: the quiet pace of his heartbeat under your ear, the hint of his cologne. The smell of the leather seats. All of the lights rushing by.

When he comes back on the line you say:

"I'm in a hotel room in London that looks like a place people come to commit suicide."

He laughs at that. Sometimes you get lucky and it's a king size bed, room service, marble in the bath tub, gleaming gold in the lobby. The truth is it doesn't make much difference. All these gilded rooms; without him, they feel like gutters.

"My place is the same," he says, "Good mini bar though. You know how I feel about that."

"I do," you agree, "all of the hangovers I've had in the last couple of years can testify to it."

"Not my fault you're a lightweight," he teases. Then there's a beat, quiet. You don't have to rush to fill it. When he speaks again his voice is lower and you imagine him holding the phone a little closer, a little tighter.

"You okay?" he says.

"I'm okay," you say back, nodding, automatic. It's the only time you ever lie to him. Then you say, "What was the thing you were at? It sounded like you were out."

"It was this cast dinner, the whole 'get to know you' shtick. It was good, fine. And I'm excited about this project, you know I am."

You do. Eight months ago it was you who looked at the script and told him to read for it. He had made the phone call before he even looked at it himself: your judgment was golden.

"It's just..." He clears his throat, hesitates. 

"Just what?" you ask.

"Nothing," he says carefully.

"C'mon, tell me."

"It's just never like Crema, is it?" he says.

Often during these calls, these casual calls, these 'just friends' calls, you two; you get yourselves into trouble. You bite your lip.

"No," you say quietly, "It's never like Crema."

There's a pause, loaded this time. You both know you could slip, inexorably, right over the edge, where it's dark, where it's deep, where it's forbidden. Where you so badly want to be, because it's never like Crema where he found you, never like Crema where he knew you, never like Crema where your clothes smelled like his and his clothes smelled like yours because at night he held you, held you, held you until you had a mutual skin, shared, the same. You can hear him breathing. So familiar, soothing. If ever you woke up in the middle of the night you'd lie there and listen to it, feel it around you, until you fell back asleep. You came to know its rhythm better than your own.

"I'm glad you called, Timmy."

He's good at this, saving it at the last second, pulling you back from the precipice, saying something that's warm but not hot, not dangerous. He says it almost absently, as if it was only meant to be a thought but somehow got away from him. You know better. Then his voice brightens, back on safe ground for real this time:

"Hey, what do you think of that book I sent you?"

A few hours earlier you'd found it, on the plane, trying to distract yourself when a patch of turbulence made the wings weave with sudden drunkenness. The Kindle had been a gift from him, despite your half-hearted protests that you liked reading real books. Trust me, he'd said,  some day when you can't fit all of your three thousand real books in your hand luggage, you'll thank me. When you opened it up today there was a copy of a trashy thriller downloaded, the sort he knows you have a taste for because he'd watched you at your apartment one week, lying with your head in his lap whilst you devoured your latest collection from cover to cover. In the front page he'd typed a note: Timmy - read this next. You'll like it. You could picture him doing it in your mind's eye, sweet, thoughtful. Even though he can't see you now, you're nodding.

"I already read the first four chapters on the way over here," you say, then, "Listen. I realised when you did that, it's still. I mean. The whole account, it's still in your name, it's still on your credit card, right?"

"Right," he says simply.

There's a loose thread on your jeans. It's probably been there for a while, but it's only now that you find the need to tug on it.

"I should, I don't know, get a new account. I should pay you back," you say, softly.

"You should pay me back," he echoes, flat. "Are you serious?"

"I buy stuff on there all the time, it's not - not fair."

"Not fair," he repeats again. His voice reads disbelief, total. You hear a door shutting, a distracted thanks, keep the change, the sound of the night again, another wailing siren in the distance. He's out of the cab, back at the hotel. Then he's speaking to you again, sharp:

"Timmy, what the fuck? It was - it was a gift."

"Yes, but. It's a gift you're still paying for. And I just thought you might not want to. Not any more."

"No you didn't think that," he says quietly, "You can't possibly think that, I don't believe it."

A moment later and he's in his room. You know because the impression of movement that you had when he was walking through the hallway stops and the air changes again on the line, becomes thicker, still. Alone. You hear him shut the door quietly behind him. He doesn't slam it because he's not angry. It would be easier if he was, maybe you'd even like it, getting a reaction, riling him, that thrilling flash of electricity in his eyes, blood rising, the savage heat of his voice etched with anger. You hardly ever argued in the past and when you did it always ended the same way, breathless in his arms, clothes scattered like fallen leaves, him spilling the tension out of you like an apology, his or yours, it didn't matter because you never had to say sorry, never had to be sorry. No, it was never him that was cruel. Only the circumstances.

"Timmy?" he says now, gently, "Come on. You didn't really call me so we could argue over a fucking Kindle like we're some pair of middle-aged divorcees bitching about who gets to keep the best set of china. I don't get it, am I not allowed to be good to you any more, just because we're not -"

He stops, abruptly, as if his words have hit a wall, huge and unseen. There's a voice in your head you don't recognise, a voice you don't like, dark and venomous like a viper, hissing go on, say it, say it. I fucking dare you. Not a couple any more. Not together any more. Couldn't make it work. Failed. Suddenly you're furious at everything, at everything that's keeping you apart, at time itself; it prickles out of your skin like sweat, you'd like to pull the treacherous words out of his throat, hand over fist, one awful truth at a time. 

"Maybe it means something to me," he says. He sounds tentative, soft. "Maybe it means something to me that I still get to be the person who's responsible for things you like, things that make you happy."

"Yeah?" you ask, "What does it mean to you?" 

It's not provocative but curious; you'd like to know, you'd always like to know what things mean to him, how he sees them, understands them. The colours of the world through his eyes.

"It means I'm not fucking up," he says, still in that soft way, he's not speaking to just anyone, wouldn't speak to just anyone like this. This is the voice he gives you and you alone. "It means I still know how to take care of the things that matter."

You swallow hard.

"You're right," you say, "I didn't call to do this, I didn't call about the Kindle. I'm sorry. I don't know why I even mentioned it. I just called because I. Because..."

Because you miss him. Because you're a long way away in a country where no one knows you and you want to go home, you want to phone home, you want to phone him. Same difference.

"It's all right," he murmurs. The soporific majesty of his voice in your ear, it never gets old. "It's okay. You can always call, Timmy. For whatever reason. It's what I'm here for."

He doesn't say, that's what friends are for. That would kill you both. Sometimes you try and rationalise everything in your head, how you got here, where you go from here. You figured out a while ago that when something has teeth you can put a muzzle on it. But then you always have to look at it and see the clawing need in its eyes and accept that the first chance it gets, it's going to bite.

*

After he's gone, after you've talked about nothing and everything for another hour just to make it better even if it's not okay, after all of that you climb into your cold white bed with the sheets packed tight around you and you lie on your back and stare at the ceiling. You'd like to think about something better. You'd like to think about something softer, something that feels good even if it's bad, even if it's rebellion, even if you're supposed to have packed those memories away like winter clothes in high summer, left to gather dust on a shelf. And so you do, you go to the treasure trove which you keep in the most private part of your mind and you unlock the catch, let yourself reach in, cup the precious waters in your hands, bathe in them. Dissolve.

You think about taking him home for Christmas, that first year together, how he arrived like a stroke of luck, or an unexpected gift under the tree; something rare and special, either way. You think about walking up the driveway in the blue twilight with him, about the fresh snap of snow under your footsteps, how he wordlessly held out his hand behind him for you to catch onto. His fingers were bare, yours wrapped safely in gloves: you felt the cold and so he had bought them for you. He thought about things like that, he noticed. When he stood on the doorstep to your parents' house he was nervous, but he needn't have been; he was loved right away. The flickering light from inside painted his face in shadows as he tried to stand in a way that would make him smaller, make him take up less space. Don't do that, you said gently, stood behind him, smoothed your palms over his shoulders so that they straightened out. He brushed his fingertips over your snow-tipped eyelashes, and the coldness melted away.

The bed you had slept in when you were a child looked even smaller when he sat on it, exhaling a thin plume of dust like a breath. You were shy of the pictures from school on your shelves, and the lamp which still had a nightlight setting. He didn't tease you about it. He picked up your baby blanket for a moment and smiled, caressed a thumb print onto a photo of you in sixth grade. Then he ran his fingertip over the cracked spines of books stacked neatly along one wall, stopped when he got to the ones that had no title etched into the fabric.

"My journals," you said. He nodded. His touch on them lingered, became curious, a question mark.

It was only when you had the house to yourselves one afternoon that he started to read them. He was wearing the sweater you loved: deep ocean blue, oversized even on him. He had worn it at Sundance the morning after you slept together the first time, as you sat through the first of a thousand panel Q&As, your bodies still slow and syncopated, lulled by the heavy cocktail of endorphins. You had quietly coveted it ever since. That day in your house he covered you over with it like a cocoon and it felt as good as you had imagined, the soft wool like sunshine on your skin, the loose weave holding all of his warmth and releasing it slowly, in lush waves. You remembered the feeling during those Q&As, how sometimes it was as if the inside of your head was a cup full of water and when everyone had finished taking a sip it was you who was left in the drought. It didn't feel like that when he read your fears and secrets and hopes and mistakes. He had earned it, and it was so safe, and private, like speaking with a part of yourself that had just arrived a little late.

Two weeks later you had a package in the mail. It felt heavy, significant, as you carried it up the stairs. When you slit it open on the kitchen table, there were five journals inside, each page full of his writing, his life, his thoughts. He'd left a note inside the package, handwritten: Quid pro quo, Clarice. That made you smile. The notes on the front page of the journals were less inviting: KEEP OUT, the neat script blared, PRIVATE!! You felt a little thrill that you had been invited in, like dipping under the neon yellow tape of a crime scene when no one was looking. 

You read the journals through the night, hungry for every past version of him that revealed a palimpsest of the whole. After, you were in each other's childhood memories. You knew the scent of the salt as it rose from the sea and woke him in the morning when he was eight, the taste of the first forbidden sip of beer from his cousin's hidden stash, the sound of his father's voice swelling to thunder through the house when he came home too late, the sick scourge of fear when he had once gone on a night swim with friends when a storm hit, and for the five endless minutes it took to find them, faced the rising certainty that they had been lost in the swell. Fifteen years later in Crema, you'd asked him to come swimming with you at night in the lake just outside the villa. He'd looked down, away, said he'd love to, but maybe you could go in the sunrise instead? At the time you'd thought nothing of it, and in the dawn light he'd been peaceful, quiet, gliding through the clinging water with his eyes on the crest of the sun. But the feeling you had when you tied those moments in his life together, it was like the spark between two hands that reach out and find each other in the dark.

It's not the journals that you remember best when you think back to that Christmas though. It's the nights you remember, the hours alone in his arms. In the velvet darkness, you would leave the curtains open and watch the snow drift down in long, dreamy spells through the window. You let him have the narrow mattress, used his body for a pillow instead. He never minded when you got restless in the night, or slipped your cold hands against the soothing heat of his belly to warm them. He blushed when you kissed his neck though, whispered, We can't. 

"Never figured you for a prude," you teased. 

"I want to," he reasoned, "But your parents are literally in the next room. Besides, your mom thinks I'm a nice guy. I have to keep that up."

You were on his chest, so you heard his voice not in words, but in the sonorous rhythm of them vibrating into your skin. You picked up a soft note floating at its heart which told you he could be persuaded. 

"It's not like you have to announce it at the breakfast table," you whispered.

"You're right," he agreed, "These creaking bedsprings will do all the announcing for me."

You could hear the smile in his voice. He was rubbing your back in slow, lingering circles. It was a gentle touch, but you knew him well by then; you felt the thirst underneath.

"Sometimes after school when I was a kid I used to go to The Met," you told him, "I was maybe, I don't know, fifteen?"

He twined one of your curls around his finger, let it go. You could tell he didn't know what to make of the sudden change of subject. 

"I've never been to The Met," he whispered.

"I'll take you," you said, put your lips over the soft bounce of his heartbeat at his throat. He arched into you, just a little. "They have this one gallery, it's full of Ancient Greek statues. That's where I always used to go."

"Yeah?" he asked. You ran one fingertip over the lush swell of his bicep, walked the path of a vein down to his wrist, slowly.

"Uh-huh," you said, "I never got bored of looking at them. Sometimes the girls, the Venuses and Aphrodites. They were beautiful."

You felt the flutter of his heartbeat, let your fingers dip into the delicate scroll of his collarbone. 

"But more often it was the boys I'd look at. I couldn't look away, sometimes. I'd never seen men who looked like that before."

You followed the smooth expanse of his chest, traced the contours of taut skin around the hard muscle of his abs.

"Do you know what I used to think?" you asked him.

"No," he whispered. His voice sounded huskier, blurred.

"I used to think, imagine what it would be like," you said, "Imagine what I would do, if I had a man like that..."

He made a little sound in his throat, the sound you imagined sun rays making when they started to rise. Your eyes locked on each other and you saw that his had taken on that silvery light again, shifting like a prism, as if someone had hung the stars in his sky. As if you had. He pushed the sheets away, leaned down and kissed a winding path over the sash of pale moonlight that curled around your hips like an embrace. You have to be so, so quiet, he murmured. The words melted against the inside of your thigh. And then, and then. And then no more words. Not for a long time.

Back in the cold hotel room you think that he's right, it's no good for that mouth, or that mind which knows all of your body's darkest desires to argue about meaningless things with you, about things that don't matter. It defiles all of the moments that came before, still sacred and profound. You let your hand slip under the sheets onto your stomach. You can feel your pulse beating there, and you think how you shouldn't, you shouldn't, it's not what friends do. But you're helpless against this, you always have been. You close your eyes and forget. You close your eyes and remember.


	4. Three Little Words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy times during the press tour...not-so-happy times during the here and now.

You travelled all four seasons together, lost count of the hours, of the oceans, of the places that you had only ever known with him by your side. In the evenings you would flit into each other's rooms like children at a sleepover who refuse to part at midnight. It felt joyful in that way too, one happiness that folded in amongst all the others, always crowned by the gilded contentment of finding yourselves asked to talk about the best summer of your lives every day. Yet still it was the mornings you loved the most, before he had stepped into his public skin. You would wake to find him next to you, a book propped on his knees, always careful to sit close enough that he could splay one long-fingered hand in your hair, to stop you from missing him in your sleep. Those quiet moments were an omen of the person you were allowed to see, the version of him to which you were access all areas whilst others were politely turned away at the door. 

One morning you were curled back against his hip, still sleepy and warm beneath the covers whilst he sat beside you. The echo of his skin's scent on the sheets made you smile, arch against his thigh to show him you were awake. His fingers slipped down from your hair and settled in against the inside of your arm, where the skin was thin and alive to touch, making you purr at the feeling. He had a way of finding the places that people never usually knew to discover, as if your skin was a map that only his hands understood how best to travel.

"What are you doing?" you asked.

"Reading," he said. 

"What are you reading?"

He held up the cover page so you could see it.

"What's it about?"

He was biting his lip to keep the smile from spilling over. You huffed out a laugh, raised your hand up towards him as if seeking the light. Outside there was the quiet patter of rain and on your palm each droplet appeared in shadow, like a splash of paint. He kept his gaze trained studiously on the book, knew better than to give into you so quickly. It gave you a fizzy champagne rush when he played with you like this and he had seized upon that immediately, indulged you often. Early on he had told you that it was the aspect of Oliver's character he found easiest to inhabit, that it came naturally to him. I guess it's just part of who I am, he had said, shrugging, then flushed at the intimacy of his words. 

You mouthed at his forearm, daring him to look at you, then wrapped yourself around his arm like a vine and brushed your forehead back and forth over the inside of his elbow, letting the mess of curls tickle him. Still nothing.

"Pay attention to me," you demanded.

"You're not good at this, are you?" he said, laughing. He capsized slowly so that you were trapped beneath his arm, giggling with delight. Then he lowered his mouth to your ear, ignoring you writhing around him to get free, and said softly:

"Is this enough attention? Huh?"

You shook your head. The way he made you smile wasn't like anyone else, it was so warm, so unguarded. 

"It's 8am and you're already bouncing off the walls," he mused, "Under no circumstances will you be having any coffee this morning."

You managed to get one arm free and slid it around his neck so that he had to look you in the eye. He whispered, shhh, be still and you quieted right away, closing your eyes in expectation. He fluttered his eyelashes over your cheek delicately, giving you the kiss of a butterfly before he held your chin and traced the shape of your lips with the tip of his tongue, slow and thoughtful as he kissed you, once, twice. Then he salvaged his book from where it had been forgotten in the covers and smiled at you, smudged his thumb over your cheek.

"C'mere," he said, kissing your nose, pulled you in against him.

You curled up with your head on his chest, nuzzling at his soft space under his chin before you settled down, his arm wrapping around your waist to keep you close. Every so often he would kiss the impression of the rain drops outside wherever they fell on you: forehead, cheek, jaw. It was April, the Spring still unsteady on its feet, newborn. There were so many months, so many miles ahead of you then, and places to be, and faces that you had never seen before. You feared none of it. Whenever he held you, you always knew that you were home.

*

Along the way you started to introduce each other to friends. By default it was only ever those who you were closest to, so that you knew they could be trusted. It wasn't about hiding; instead it was about privacy, about letting what had grown so purely between you flourish in its own way without the harsh glare of any spotlight to taint it. You dotted the events around at random, savouring the feeling of welcoming him into your fold, never wanting it to end: drinks with one on that night, dinner with two on another. Your hand in his beneath the table, always.

During a two week break from the press tour he flew you out to LA, let everyone who mattered know that you'd be there. You remember when the plane landed in the wavy shimmer of the heat-baked tarmac it seemed immediately right to you that he should belong in a place where it was eternally summer, dulcet and honeyed by the sun. You drove home through the wide open roads into a sunset like none you had ever seen before: a blaze of peony fire on the horizon that cast the smouldering darkness above it in a deep royal blue. You leaned out against the open window frame and watched the thin fronds of the palm trees sway into ghostly silhouettes as the bright sash of stars twisted their way up through the twilight to crown the night, let the cool breeze run its curious fingers over your face. The sounds of the city mingled into a low, resonant thrum that rolled by in slow waves through the window. At the stoplights he walked two fingers over red, yellow and green where they bloomed along your shoulder, ruffled your hair before the car pulled away. Daydreamer, he said. You could hear the smile in his voice. 

You were lingering on the cusp of sleep by the time the car rolled to a halt. It was a habit you had learned from the hours spent on planes and trains and in the backseat of cabs with him: closing your eyes in one place, snapping awake in another. He knew exactly how to find you in the quiet valley between waking and dreaming; he had reached into that golden space a thousand times. Twist of the key in the ignition. Click of the latch. Footsteps on the gravel path. Sound of your door opening, light spilling over your face. The smell of his skin, his heat. His voice breathed soft against your hair: baby, we're here.

*

In his bed you re-learned each other, the intensity somehow pitched even higher now that there was no pressure to quiet every moan and sigh for fear that the thin hotel walls might give you away. But it was more than just that, it was symbolic too: this was his territory and every time he claimed you as his own in it you could feel the echo of yourself slipping under his skin just a little more. The night before you met his friends, you lay with him afterwards, his clever fingers still stroking the embers of your climax where they smouldered at the base of your spine, threatening to kindle them back into ribbons of flame at any moment.

"Do you think they'll like me?" you said into his chest.

"Do you think they won't like you?" he asked gently.

He kissed your forehead, as if that was where the root of these rogue thoughts had unfurled. Both of you were still breathless, glossed with sweat from desire and the swollen heat of the night. A car passing by outside threw a moment of light into the room, cracking amber like the yolk of an egg against the wall.

You shrugged.

"Some people don't," you said.

"Really?" His eyes were glittering in the low light, the way oceans did when seen after dark. He traced a lazy path to your ear and whispered, "Name them."

You stopped for a while to think about it. 

"I think you're proving my point," he said, laughing, and kissed your protests quiet.

The next day there was lemon yellow sunlight pouring down over all the people in his back yard like rain, dappling through the leaves up above. It reminded you of Crema. He rubbed warmth into your back with the flat of his palm and said, come on. It's okay, you're just with me. The sea of curious faces was broken by a single wave of a woman who walked over with her hands outstretched, beaming. "That's Liz. I told you she'd do this", he said, smiling, right before she cupped your face in her fingertips as if you had known each other forever.

"So this is Timmy!" she said warmly. Her touch on your face was cool and kind; it made the flush of your skin lessen by degrees.

"Yeah," he said proudly, smiling, "this is Timmy."

He put his arm around your shoulders and squeezed, flipped your rebellious curl away from your eyes with his other hand. In your head you felt the image you had of yourself start to change, as if you were a fuzzy picture that he was drawing into focus, making you bigger, brighter. Whole.

*

Down in his garden there were glasses dotted around like diamonds in the grass, catching the first drops of dew, and the rose embers of the barbecue still radiating a low, sweet heat. The stars in LA were shimmering above you, a neat network of nerves spread over the skin of the sky. You were nestled under the trees, lying over the throw cushions there, surrounded by a cluster of candles that trickled soft fingers of liquid light over your skin. Behind you, the evening breeze tipped a bottle to its side, sent the quiet spill of foam flooding.

In the house there were his footsteps, then closer, padding over the grass, then his shadow, profile thrown into sharp, perfect relief by the flames. He pulled the rest of the cushions across and lay down over them with you, rested his chin on your chest.

"So," he said, "everybody really hated you, huh?"

"Shut up," you said gently, stroking his hair. It was hard to get words out straight, you noticed, but it wasn't important. Inside you everything felt warm, peaceful, as if the steady metronome of the flames from the candles had settled inside your heartbeat.

"I just want you to know how ridiculous you are," he said, "They loved you. Seriously, I think my entire social life just became conditional on you being with me."

"'S okay," you told him, eyes still on the stars, "We can come as a pair."

"That sounds nice," he murmured, kissed your cheek.

You were quiet together for a while, his lips brushing over your pulse, your gaze still flickering lazily over the endless constellations whilst you toyed with the baby-soft hairs at the nape of his neck. Then he reached over, pulled a half-empty cocktail pitcher towards him and breathed in for a moment.

"Jesus," he said, coughing, "how much alcohol is in that?"

"No...not much. Liz said - said there was barely any..."

He started laughing.

"And you believed her?"

He leaned up and looked into your eyes for a moment, started laughing again. 

"Timmy," he whispered, "You're drunk."

"No," you said firmly, "no. I am not."

"You are. But you're an adorable drunk, so it's okay."

"You're just biased," you told him, "'cause you like me." 

"You think so?"

"Know so."

"Well," he said, "far be it from me to argue with the wisdom of Timothée Chalamet."

The stars were getting clearer as the night settled in on itself, winking like cat's eyes in the sky. He eased you upright and they tipped dizzily for a moment, spinning out of focus. 

"C'mon," he said, scooped you up into his arms. You liked the feeling of the cool grass brushing over the soles of your feet, soft and tickling until you shimmied up and wrapped your legs around his waist.

"I can walk..." you offered vaguely.

"Uh-huh, okay. Let's test that theory later," he whispered into your hair, kissed it. 

The truth was, you didn't mind being carried at all. He was warm, and soft, and once your arms were twined safely around his neck he stopped and just held you for a moment, cradling the back of your head protectively. Where shall we go? he whispered, Where shall I take my Timmy?

You pressed your cheek against the solid line of his shoulder and let him decide, peeked out over the velvety haze of the garden, fading as he padded towards the warm light of the house. He stopped in the kitchen, settled you on the worktop and pressed a tall glass of water into your hands.

"Drink that," he said, "The whole thing."

You did as you were told, studying him with easy adoration as he moved around the kitchen, putting you together a plate of leftovers from lunch. It was a huge space, but lived in, cozy, a stack of his scripts on the side of the counter, a photo of you and him together tacked up on the notice board. He watched you eat lazily, eyes smoky from a different kind of hunger.

"You've got sauce..." he said, gesturing, nuzzled against your ear, leaned in. Licked it away from your lip with a smile. You put the plate down and wrapped your arm around him, rested the other hand against your hip where it would be easy for him to find. A moment later there was the warmth of his fingers over it, seeking, stroking. You remember thinking, this is the simplest thing in the world.

*

It's a cold day on the phone to him in Central Park, early in November for the weather to be so bitter. You just did a magazine shoot and your skin feels stripped and a little raw where you scrubbed away the make up after, made worse by the rough chill of the air. It's a Tuesday. The problem with Tuesdays is they are nothing days, in-between and restless; they're not days where the world is liable to wake up, drowsy from its dizzy tilt, and say yes, I have fallen askew and right itself. Yet for just one moment when your phone rang and his name flashed up on the screen, your own little axis tipped, became still and steady again.

Now you're talking and the background purr of his breathing doesn't reassure you like it usually does; it's off, a little fast, a little rattling. He's in New Orleans, he tells you, re-shooting for a few days. The wiry thrum of Bourbon Street outside his hotel pours through the phone like honey. His voice doesn't sound right to you, not just from the distance. If he was here so you could touch him then his skin wouldn't feel right either, you're sure of it. 

"You're sick, aren't you?"

"Timmy -"

"Don't avoid the question," you say. It's your right, even now, to talk to him like this. Anyone else and he wouldn't listen. 

He sighs. He's never been a good patient. You remember him on the press tour, fighting through, eyes bright with exhaustion. Later in your room he'd finally caved in to it: hair mussed, in his sweatpants, lying across your lap on the couch, hunched under the duvet where he'd stripped it off the bed and dragged it over, snuffling miserably all the while. The TV had scarcely any channels, so he'd been watching re-runs of Planet Earth, quietly mesmerised by them. Every so often he'd reach up and tug on your sleeve and say thickly Timmy, look and point at the screen. Your island boy, hearing the call of the wild. You'd said that to him, made him laugh. You wonder if he remembers.

"It's not that bad," he's saying now, "You don't need to worry."

You can hear the fever's tongue in his voice, hot and seething, underscoring the lie. It's a white lie, designed to soothe and pacify, and you know exactly why he's telling it: because if you asked right now, if you asked him if he wanted you there, if he wanted you to drop everything and go to him, then in the tangle of his frayed nerves and aching head and burning heat, he wouldn't trust himself to say no, to keep in the lines and behave. You study the rising flare of the sunset in the distance, bite your lip so hard it hurts, to make the words stay in, to keep them fluttering like butterflies in your chest, trapped under glass. You talk around them, and everything you say comes like a river trying to flow around rocks. Go and sleep, you say. Go and rest. Go and call me in the morning.

You've just landed in LA when he messages you. You step outside into the slick hold of the night, the air heavy with the sultry promise of rain. Feeling much better, he writes, sends a picture of an empty soup bowl to prove it. Ironic, of course, that you're in his city just when he isn't, but time makes easy fools of you both, always has done. You settle into the back of the taxi and breathe out a wet mist of relief on the closed window, watch the first sparks of rain smudge over it like fingerprints. Lights pass by in the distance, blooming in strange patterns, fading away over the heartbeat of the windscreen wipers as they tick back and forth. It's warm in here, quiet. Shadows flicker over your hands like slow whispers. You close your eyes.

You wake up, but not really. You're still in that half-light between waking and sleep, that fragile bubble between here and now. Daydreamer, he said. That golden space. Unfolding around you, the sounds are all so familiar:

Twist of the key in the ignition. 

You could be anywhere.

Click of the latch. 

This could be any time.

Footsteps on the gravel path. 

They could be anyone's.

Sound of your door opening, light spilling over your face.

This could be - 

"Sir? Mr Chalamet?"

You open your eyes, blink, let time and place slip down your spine like a cold fingertip. Smile, thank your driver. Step out of the cab and into the warm night noises of the city. Close the door, grab your bags. Leave a piece of yourself behind, waiting for the three little words that never come.


	5. Sacred Spaces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Reality bites as the press tour ends...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I'm sorry for the delay with this chapter! When I first started posting this story, I hadn't anticipated that I would end up pretty much re-writing every chapter before sharing it with you guys, but somehow I always seem to. There's lots of editing to be done on the next few chapters, so I may update a little less frequently from here on out. Thank you so much for being patient, and for all of your lovely feedback - I appreciate it more than I can say!
> 
> The second half of this chapter is a nod to Timmy and Armie going to Crema and dancing with fans in the square, which I think was back in January this year. I know the press tour didn't actually end in Crema, but in this story it does, as I wanted that sense of them coming full circle, back to where they started. Meanwhile, the first half of this chapter is a flashback to much earlier on in the press tour...I'm a little nervous about it to be honest, but I hope the intensity will make sense to you in the context of everything these boys feel for each other.
> 
> Enjoy!

There was sunlight spilling onto your bed, and dust flickering back and forth through the rays, and him, sketched golden in the centre of it all. When he turned his face into the light it picked out his eyelashes, made them look feathery, longer. You wanted to kiss them. He put his head against your chest where you were sitting in his lap and whispered, "you could..."

It took you a moment to understand. You had your fingers tangled loosely in the collar of his shirt, tugging it away from the delicate architecture of his neck and shoulder, so you could see his pulse ticking in his throat. You brushed your lips against his ear and whispered back, is that what you want? There was no particular reason why it should have been that day; it wasn't special, it had no innate meaning. Like everything else between you, it had just ripened in its own time. 

He nodded in answer to your question, slowly, swallowed hard, eyes closing with the weight of desire. You followed the long line of his neck with one fingertip and he made a soft sound, the promise of more to come. Under your touch, the tapping of his heartbeat was fast, faltering.

"Shhh," you soothed, "You don't have to." 

He opened his eyes, and when you looked into them it was as if you were looking into the heart of a prism, seeing for the first time the lone shard of glass around which the riot of light had begun. 

"Just," he said. He put his head on your chest again. "Please."

He had never asked you for anything before, and you would sooner have lost your tongue than let it learn the shape of the word no.

You left the world beyond your bodies behind you, shed it like winter trees stripping hungrily of their leaves. For so long you had thought you held the whole of him in the palm of your hand, but when he wrapped his arms around your neck and clung to you, he was soft, unsure, undiscovered. It was the quietest he had ever been with you, but you had grown wiser by then, you had no need for his noise. You read his body like the pages of a favourite book: the arch of his back, the naked canvas of his throat when he bared it to you, the way your kisses down his spine made him melt beneath you; those were all chapters of his desire. Beneath your lips, you traced his chest and felt his heart spilling its rhythm like the cradle of a chalice beginning to overflow. That's so much, he said, shielded his face against your neck, afraid for you to see him unravel. You whispered please don't hide it and he sobbed low in his throat, breaking into himself. You whispered be here with me and he was, he was.

Afterwards, he sheltered drowsy and quiet under you, your body spread starfish over his back whilst you kissed his neck, his shoulders, sipping his skin like wine. Every time you did something he liked he would make a little sighing noise, barely even aware of himself doing it. Okay? you whispered in his ear, and he nodded minutely, his eyes fluttering closed again. You let him have your fingers to suck, knowing that he needed to keep some part of you within him, only pulling away to walk them along each rung of his ribs against the sheets. Then you put your lips into his hair, silky and damp with sweat, breathed, what will we do when the press tour is over?

It must have seemed a strange moment to ask, when you had months of it still to come, when you had the hours rolled out before you like the fields of lemon groves in Italy that seemed to skim the limits of eternity. In a feast of time, why stop to think about the famine? You couldn't help it though. Being inside him had reminded you that you couldn't be without him. He stirred gently then, pressed his lips to your wrist and murmured, I'm not going anywhere. We'll figure it out. You nodded, leaned round to kiss the bridge of his nose. It was warm under your lips where he had caught the sun back home. You remember you didn't like to think of him being careless with himself in that way.

*

The movie had started for you in Crema and so it was only right that it should end there too. It was a hallowed space for both of you, and you had found ways of stitching it into your lives like patches of colour on repeat in a quilt. The answer to the security questions at your bank: the name of a memorable place, easy, Crema. The code for the alarm in his house: 27362, C-R-E-M-A. He'd hacked your Instagram account on the third try, password, dreamed up in a pink haze at five in the morning when he'd looked especially glorious sleeping beside you, peachesandcrema. "You're a fifteen year old girl," he'd said, cackling, "I will never let you forget this moment." You'd only smiled. You hadn't told him that it was just the way the first light had looked when it dripped across his naked body, honeyed for miles until you reached the pale sashes of secret skin that had never known the sun's kisses, only yours.

The plane flew into a storm on the way over. Lightning flashed against the windows like a sharp shriek in the night. It was as if you were held in the fist of an incandescent rage, shaken in time with a furious heartbeat. You were shaking too, your hand in a claw on the arm rest between you. 

"I'm sorry," you said to him, trying to play it down, "I'll be okay in a minute."

He only tilted his head to one side. Perfectly fine, you thought; that was the last time he'd looked at you that way. You turned your face towards the window, away from him, and sheltered behind your arm, hating the fact that he could still read your tension from the shiver that circuited your spine with every unsteady jolt of the plane. 

"Hey," he coaxed, slid his palm around your wrist as if to ease it away from your face. You shook your head, crowded closer to the wall.

"Don't," you said tightly, "I don't want you to see me like this."

He frowned. It reminded you of the frown that soft-knitted toy bears had when they'd been made with more love than talent. He asked, why would you say something like that?, as if he couldn't possibly believe that there might be a part of you that he would flinch away from. Before you could reply the plane rolled into another wave of turbulence, stuttered, dived, and you put your forehead down against your knees with a groan, the rational part of your mind blinking out like a light bulb in a power cut. 

"I hate this, I hate this," you muttered.

He made a sympathetic humming noise, one hand spread in the middle of your back, rubbing circles. That high up, it felt like the only thing anchoring you to the earth.

"Hey," he said mildly, "guess what?"

"What?" you asked miserably, "We're going to crash and die stuffed in this tin can like sardines? I already know that."

"No," he laughed, "not that."

"What then?"

"I love you," he said simply.

You sat up, weightless, leaning towards him intently. The sound of the words rolling from his tongue for the first time was so sweet that you almost thought you could taste them, each letter spun like sugar on the air. You looked down at yourself, uncertain. You were wearing his sweater, because you'd spilled coffee all over yours at the airport, keyed up before the flight, and under it your skin felt tacky with sweat, every pore grimed with fear like the touch of a dirty fingerprint. You'd slept in the car on the drive to the airport and it had left your curls in moody disarray, untamed even by the careful work of his hands on them. He'd chosen a small version of you to love, one that would never have deemed itself worthy of him. From afar you heard yourself, disbelieving, whispering:

"Even - even now?" 

He nodded.

"Very much," he said quietly, "All the time."

*

Luck was kind to you: the plane landed safely, and back in Crema you had never been more alive. There was music in the streets, and laughter swelling between the cool stone of old buildings, and his eyes always on you over the crowd when you danced to the beat of your blood running wiry and smooth beneath your skin. Up above you the midnight sky was black ink, deep enough to dive in.

When you found each other in the crush of bodies you were both laughing, drunk on the atmosphere alone. All around there was the click and snap of photos, applause, your name and his name ringing together over the beat of the music so that even the sleek crescent of the moon seemed to throb in time with its rhythm. Come away with me, he said to you, as if it were just that simple. His eyes had that bright glint of mischief that made you feel you would float to the bottom of the ocean with him if he asked, fortified on a single breath.

At the corner of the piazza, you turned back to see it one last time. The car you had pulled up in was frozen as if in amber, doors still flung wide like the wings of a bat. There were real bats speckled in the sky as well, picking their way carefully through the stars whilst the crowd pulsed below. Sound sparked out at random around the piazza, tugging you back towards it, but the empty street unfolding ahead was irresistible. You smiled, already half-cloaked in shadows, and slipped away into the darkness with him, leaving only the silvery trail of laughter in your wake.

*

Together you roamed the streets, your joined hands swinging back and forth between you, careless of anyone who might see. The town knew you; it knew all your secrets, it had seen the seeds of your feelings for him and cradled you safely in its palm to let them grow. Now it would never betray you. But it seemed that it had kept its own little secrets too, all along: you had found a clutch of streets in its heart that neither of you thought you had ever seen before.

"Luca always said it was bigger than it looked," you shrugged.

He stopped under a streetlight, the thin flame of yellow swaddled in a cloud of mist. Then he raised his chin and pointed.

"What's that?" he said, tugged your hand to lead you towards it.

From the outside it didn't look like anything worth stopping for. It was humble and stooped, the white facade of the building shot through with dark cracks that started from the ground and twined up like vines. There was no stained glass or frescoes, no marble tiles; it was only the modest silhouette of the crucifix against the night sky that marked it out as a church. The door didn't announce itself with any daunting height or ornately carved stone up above it. Instead it was a narrow wooden archway clasped low on the face of the building, the iron bolt slid through its skin like a vein. When he pushed it carefully with one hand it drew open, offering a long, eerie creak. Flickering light the colour of fresh apricots rose out to meet you. 

"You really want to go in there?" you asked.

He smiled, bowed down to gesture you in before him. You sighed, ducked under the doorway, and stopped dead on the precipice so that he walked into you when he followed. He stumbled a little and then together you froze. For a long moment there was only the sound of your held breaths. 

"Should have guessed," he said softly. Your hands reached out of their own accord and entwined again.

Inside the church the ceiling rose so high that it seemed to stretch to the very heavens above. The beauty that had been lacking outside was cradled in abundance there; every surface was gold, every tile in the wall was adorned, every pane of glass marbled with colour. The air was sweet and heavy, fragrant with the remnants of incense and the sigh of smoke from candles that had breathed their last. That was where the light was coming from: a shimmering wave of them, studded like jewels in a crown, burning serenely in the darkness. 

"Let's talk," he said softly.

"Here?" you asked.

Despite your words, you knew there could be no more delay tactics, no more room to hide. In ten days you would leave Crema, leave the press tour, search your bags for space to fold the memories in alongside your clothes. You'd endured flashes of it already - standing at the airport gates, him whispering in your ear be good, be safe, be home soon \- but they had been fleeting, romantic almost, both of you steady in the knowledge that the press tour would stitch you together again like twin planets spinning back into orbit. Now there would be no safety nets to fall into, no landmarks to lead the way. The path was yours to lose, yours to find.

"We have to, Timmy," he said. 

You nodded, surrendering at last. Together you sat down, your ankle entwined around his, his palm holding the nape of your neck. You talked. You talked about impossible dates, about which countries when, about which flights where. You talked about schedules, about pre-production, post-production, about commitments that cared nothing for the commitment you had forged to each other. In the end you had something both of you had been pushing away with unsteady hands; you had the date when you would next see each other after you left Crema. The words were like stones in your mouth, huge, choking. You put your hand over them to hold them inside. 

"Timmy," he said.

His voice was low and soothing as he cupped your face in his hand, the tenderness unbearable. You couldn't stand to look at him, to stare into those eyes that you would have to do without gazing into for so long. If looks could kill then this would be the moment that his did.

"Six weeks," you breathed, "six weeks, six weeks." Over and over, like a prayer. 

"Don't look like that," he said, still so gentle, still holding you, "Come on, shh, don't. They haven't invented a time zone yet where I won't answer the phone to you."

He reached down and laced your fingers through his. The play of the light from the candles was beautiful on his skin, trailing shadows over the delicate tendons of his wrist. 

"We'll be okay," he told you. 

You looked down at your hands twined together and thought, just don't let go.


	6. River's Bend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys deal with life post-press tour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, so sorry again for the delay - real life is daring to get in the way of my writing life!
> 
> Secondly, a tiny little warning in this chapter for minor drug use.
> 
> Finally, I need to update you guys on timeline-y things! As you all know, there are two timelines at play: Timmy's memories of the past, and the few scenes you have seen so far which are set in the present. At the beginning of Chapter 3 (when you first see Timmy and Armie in the present), I meant to tell you guys that all of the present tense scenes in Ordinary People are in fact set in Autumn 2019. But, looking back at my author's notes, I see that I rather spectacularly managed to forget to do that. I'm so sorry! I hope it's not too jarring a revelation to learn now. The reason for setting their timeline a little way ahead is simply because I couldn't really imagine that these boys would go from being such a tight, happy couple at the end of January 2018 to being broken up by early September 2018. As you will see over the next couple of chapters, it was a little more complicated than that...

Time moves differently in the early hours of the morning, cupped in that liminal space between night and day. Perhaps it's the weight of dreams that slows it down. Not your dreams though: you're wide awake, restless, sprawled messily on your living room floor. It isn't designed for lying on; already there's a dull ache nestling in at the base of your spine. Up above you the narrow web of cracks in the ceiling splinter out like the beginning of pathways etched on the surface of a map. You raise your hand to your mouth lazily, take another drag from the joint, hold it until it starts a heat in your chest that glows ruby red; the threat of fire on a dragon's breath. Then you breathe a long plume of smoke up and out, aimless. You can go any direction you like. North, East, South, West. But all roads lead back to him.

Smoking and sleepless at 3am; no, you're not going to find it in any healthy living handbooks. It feels good though, feels better than anything has in a long time. Even the glint of guilt stitched underneath smoothes the sharp edges away, hushes the silky hiss of nerve endings that always feel the unexpected chill on the other side of the bed and still wake you up even now to ask, where is he? You didn't smoke very often when you were together. Makes sense: you had no need to dull your senses then, you wanted to feel everything; he had made you fever-bright and you were so eager to burn. And perhaps it was something else too, perhaps it was that he made you feel like this naturally. This languid, this peaceful. No substitutes required.

All around you it's dead quiet. At this hour, even the city sleeps. You make no move back to bed though; you only reach up and stretch out, arching like a cat. Your knuckles brush over the bookshelf behind you. It's the first thing anyone notices in this room when they walk in, you get comments all the time. It's not that big but it's solid somehow, stately, polished oak with a heart-shaped flaw on one side. Sometimes people ask where you bought it and you smile and tell them it's a family piece, and maybe they see the sadness around the edges of your mouth when you say that or maybe they don't, who can tell. Either way it isn't a lie; he'd made it for you, paying far more mind to your occasional remarks about needing more storage space than you ever did. None of that flat-pack bullshit for my boy, he'd said, laying out the pieces of wood on the floor like a jigsaw puzzle. He may as well have been crafting you a crown of diamonds, for how it made you feel.

That was what it was to love him: a feeling so pure that just thinking of it now sends a heady spill tipping through your veins like fresh water swelling up from a spring. Loving him was simple. Loving him was walking the long way back from your agent's office in mid-town to stop by the deli that sold his favourite bagels. It was calling out be careful after you said goodbye whenever he went somewhere without you. It was ordering peppers on your pizza even though you hated them, so that he could eat them by the handful, laughing at your horrified expression. It was yelling at him when he left his shoes in the hallway and you tripped over them. It was waking up in the morning and finding his notes next to you on the pillow. Just making coffee. Just gone to buy breakfast. Just wanted you to know how pretty you are when you're asleep. He had the most beautiful handwriting, all swoops and swirls like swans diving; even his filthiest missives could have passed for the pages of a prayer service from afar. Perhaps that was why you kept them, every single one. 

And loving him was other things too, softer, intimate, so delicate that you didn't speak about them for fear that they might break. Loving him was handing him the phone every time you spoke to your mom and letting him speak to her too. Mama Chalamet, he called her sometimes, teasing, but you knew he adored her, knew it meant more than that. In the mornings when you stayed with your parents he would go to her, still soft and mussed with sleep, and lean down to let her hug him. He didn't speak of his own family often and when he did it was guarded and incomplete, like a movie skipping over scenes so you only knew half the story. Once he had said to you only I wasn't planned. The inflection of pain in those words had left you aching for days, but privately you weren't surprised: who could plan for someone like him; no one ever planned for a miracle, did they?

Loving him shifted shape sometimes, it knew how to be fluid, flexible. When he tore a muscle and spent weeks with his arm in a sling, it was sitting beside the bath to wash his hair, the foam silky against your hands, the flutter of his pulse at his temples, the way he'd shiver when you traced your fingers over the intricate shell of his ear. Sometimes it would relax him so much that he'd lean back into your chest, leaving wet patches like hand prints on your t-shirt, sighing when you dipped to taste the slick skin of his neck with your mouth. And when you woke up in the night to find him half-tipped out of the bed beside you, a childhood habit that had trailed him into adulthood, then loving him was getting up in the darkness to walk to his side of the bed. It was kneeling down beside him so his forehead was on your shoulder and coaxing him back into place, whispering to him, shh, you're sleeping funny again. It was watching him wake up and look at you with such naked trust, his hair rumpled, eyes still misted over with dreams, and easing in beside him to keep him safe. Then he'd slip back under cradled on your chest, skin bare and hot with that deep flush that only sleep can deliver.

All of that was loving him. But missing him, missing him was something else entirely, an absence of self that you still can't describe now. Every bed was too big without the reassuring dip of his weight on the mattress next to you. The sun rose and set in black and white. His body was lost to yours like its own shadow; you went everywhere and yet you left no trace. At night the constellations of stars which he had once pointed out to you were chips of ice, cold and indifferent in a melting sky. And in the mirror every morning there was a ghost, except instead of its own face, it wore yours.

*

June in New York came sticky with sun, heat rising like steam on the sidewalks and the skies up above painted so blue that it was like looking into his eyes as he lay over you. The hours were clay in his hands; he would mold dates, shuffle time like a deck of cards to deal you an ace of days with him. Since Crema there had been four goodbyes, four blissful homecomings: an even scale. But already you had that tally in your head, that prying little voice telling you that soon the hands of the clock would flick you into their grasp and scatter you apart like seeds.

That summer he surprised you, arrived at your apartment a day early. You had him for three whole weeks, a lucky break between projects for both of you. He had a suitcase in one hand and a bag in the other, emanating a scent which reminded you of meals in Crema that started at dusk and breezed on until midnight and beyond.

"Italian," he said, "obviously."

He stepped through the door and found your fridge, put the bag in there, already at home. Then he gave you one of his best smiles, like he was a kid who had been told he could skip his vegetables and go straight to dessert. You were speechless at the sight of him, but your body knew enough to sway into his chest, wrap your arms around his neck. Then you burrowed under his t-shirt, like an animal finding a safe place to nest.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," he said cheerfully, when he realised where you were going. You ignored him, nosed your way up his belly and chest where he was warm and furry with golden hair, the way he should be, before curling in against the seam of his arm and side. You breathed deep, once, twice, felt parts of you glide back into harmony that had slid out of tune when you last left him behind you at LAX.

"I'm so happy you're here," you said, "How are you even here?"

He shrugged, rested his chin on top of the soft patch under his t-shirt, where your hair was.

"Eh, y'know. Pulled a few strings. People have been known to find me charming."

You snorted into his chest.

"Probably not people who've seen the way you eat a bowl of spaghetti."

"Says the guy who's so far gone that he even finds my sweat adorable," he replied seamlessly. His body was busy against you, industrious, funnelling air through his lungs, pumping blood, buzzing with activity, the steady three-two tempo of his heart sounding out all is well, he lives. You nuzzled your way to his side and bit him slowly, relishing his skin, hot and reacting under your teeth. He sucked in a breath, tight.

"I'd like a real hug," he said, "once you're done communing with my armpit."

You wriggled your way into the open air, flushed from his body heat, and put your arms back around him. He whispered, up, up and when you pounced he caught you easily, held you on his hips, squeezed you with everything he had so that you made a little moaning noise. You were chanting softly in his ear, very much, very much, and he laughed and whispered back, all the time, all the time. It had become your way of saying it; five little words instead of three. 

He carried you through to your bedroom. You liked the way he did it: casually, as if it was your regular mode of travel, but careful too, always careful, the palm of one hand cradling your head protectively. 

"What have you been doing in here?" he said when he stepped into the room, laughing. 

"Tidying up for you, changing the sheets," you explained.

Your voice was blurred as you breathed the words out against his shoulder, indistinct. The windows were thrown open and early evening sunlight cast the room in a lazy rose glow, your white sheets and pillows tumbled all over like clouds, his arrival interrupting them the same way a burst of lightning might. He toed at a stack of books towering precariously and they capsized at once. He made you the bookshelf not long after.

"I missed you making every room look like a hurricane just went through it," he told you.

He lay you down on the bed, added his shoes to the clutter before he joined you. Your pillow was discarded across the room, half in and half out of a fresh case. It didn't matter; he cushioned your head with his hand instead.

"I missed this swan neck," he murmured, and kissed it, feeling you shiver. You put your hand up to his shoulder to hold him and he pulled back to kiss your palm.

"I missed these hands," he said, "I missed these arms, and this chest, and this insanely ticklish stomach..."

He kissed every place he mentioned, making you rupture into helpless laughter when he got to the last one. Then suddenly he stopped.

"What...?" you said, half sitting up, still laughing.

"Wait," he said, smiling, "wait, wait, wait..."

He dived under the covers at the foot of the bed, then sat up with them round his shoulders like a cape, wholly unselfconscious. 

"Look," he said happily. He lifted your ankle to his mouth gently, kissed it. "It's the cutest feet in the land, how could I forget about these? I missed them too..."

You were still laughing when he eased back over you, held your jaw in his hand. 

"I missed this face," he whispered.

His tone was different then, not playful any more but instead soft and intense with desire. His free hand was on your chest, brushing over the place where it always hurt the most when he was gone. You could feel things kindling under his touch, hot and bubbling as if he were conjuring them up from thin air, things you were afraid for him to see, things savage and wretched that stole sleep from you in the night. Your ribs were cracking with the pressure to keep them hidden; they pushed like hot hands against glass. Behind your eyes, there was a sudden sharp, familiar prickling.

"Sorry I'm being so lame," you mumbled when he saw, looking away. 

He shook his head, leaned in, lapped your tears away at source. He took them only when they pooled at the edge of your eyelashes before they fell, as if they were stars he was stealing from the sky.

"Tell me what you want," he whispered, but part of him already knew. His fingers slid down your wrist and hooked under the tight band of your watch, pulling it away from your skin. You hadn't realised how heavy it felt, what a burden it was, until he unbuckled it and it was only the ghost memory of the dial on top of your wrist, and the pressure of his hand stroking away the place where it had cut in below. He didn't just leave the watch on the nightstand beside you. Instead, he opened the bedside drawer and threw it to the back, his eyes never once leaving you as he did it.

"I want everything else to stop," you told him.

He paused, as if assessing whether his body could achieve such a thing. Then he nodded, once, decisively. It reminded you of being on set, when Luca would pull you both aside for a pep talk and say something impossible: he is the universe. And the audience will know this only by how you look at him. Something like that. You'd be chewing your lip, squirming, trying not to catch anyone's eye in case you couldn't help but laugh. But he would only nod, thoughtfully, as if to say, yes, I get this, I understand it exactly as you would want me to. You'd envied him that: such a grafter, all-American in the way you had never felt, even though you were born and raised. He seems very confident, you had said, as Elio. But you were never really talking about Oliver, were you.

*

"Maybe it's me," you said to him one day.

You were yelling it through the bathroom door. It was late September, the leaves just starting to turn on the trees whilst the sunlight stayed bright and hopeful.

"What?" he yelled back, "I can't hear you."

You nosed your way around the door slowly. He was standing at the sink shaving, dressed in just a white t-shirt and boxers, fresh and still flushed from the shower. You leaned against the doorway and watched steam coil around him, watched the way the veins rolled sinuously beneath the golden skin of his forearms as he drained the water away. Sometimes when you were being tough on yourself you wondered whether you'd still want him if he was less tall, less muscled, less kissed by the sun and beautiful. But by then it was stupid to even question it; you would love him in any flesh.

"I was saying, maybe it's me," you said, following him through to his bedroom, "Maybe I'm just too sensitive." 

He was kneeling in front of the wardrobe, rummaging through shoes. You must have been going out somewhere, drinks, dinner; he was always good that way. He wasn't ever showy about it. He just took care of things, took care of you.

"You're not too sensitive," he said, "Missing me is a very natural thing."

You laughed, reached down and ruffled his hair out of place until he batted you away gently.

"Stop it, I'm being serious," you said. 

"Okay, I'm listening," he said, nodding.

You chewed on the side of your thumb nervously, then:

"Sometimes when I talk to my friends, I feel like they don't...like it's not the same for them. I mean, they're doing the whole long distance thing but it's. It's like they don't...feel...as much." You cleared your throat, shy. "As much as I feel for you."

You know how it is, one had said, shrugging, what can you do? It's hard. We just FaceTime a lot, I guess. So flippant, so easy. You had wanted to say, where is your ache? Why don't you hurt like me? You were a child of the digital age; if ever asked to give a concise answer, you'd pitch for less than 140 characters. But with him it was different, what you felt was so tangible, you couldn't say it to him through a screen, couldn't love him that way either. It only ever made it worse; it made you want to reach up and try to feel him, like a prisoner at visiting time putting his hands out to touch the glass. It felt like almost but not quite, like so close but so far. 

You darted a glance at him, still chewing. A thin seam of blood bloomed along the edge of the nail, unexpected. He reached up to hold your wrist, then slipped your thumb in his mouth for a moment and sucked it clean. You didn't resist him: he'd already had sweat, semen, tears; why deny him the rest?

"Don't think that I don't miss you just as much," he said quietly, "Promise you won't ever think that." 

You flushed, nodded. 

"Promise," you said.

He smiled, checked your thumb again, hummed his approval that it had stopped bleeding. Then there was a tumbling noise from inside the wardrobe and his lap filled abruptly with a medley of your shoes and his. You'd been stockpiling yours in there, slowly. You liked the way it looked. Your sneakers, his boots, nestled together. Everything in its right place, comfortable. Home.

"How many pairs of white sneakers does one person need?" he muttered, shaking his head, but there was no heat in it. He was trying not to laugh; you knew because the sharp point of one tooth just peeked out and settled on his lower lip. He had these imperfect little incisors, ever so slightly crooked, nothing you'd ever notice unless you really studied him. You looked out at him from under your eyelashes and squeezed your bare toes into the carpet.

"The cutest feet in the land need to be properly dressed," you told him.

"I've created a monster," he sighed, but he leaned down and kissed the arch of your foot just the same. Then he stood and brushed the ever-present curl out of your eyes, skimmed his fingertips delicately over your cheek and held you there. 

"You're too hard on yourself," he said, "It's never wrong to feel things."

*

And feel things you did. 

You felt it when you counted up the days on the calendar. Eight days in May. Three weeks in June. A drought in July, then a burst of breath in August when you'd had him for two smooth weeks, and on it went, until when all the counting was done you realised that you had seen each other only seven times in the ten months since Crema. 

You felt it when you were spread so far apart across the hands of the clock that the window of time you had to speak to each other every day was like a door left ajar in the breeze, always on the verge of clicking shut.

You felt it when you got food poisoning and he flew home to you because he didn't believe you when you said on the phone that you were fine, fine, it will pass, because it had to, because all things passed eventually, nothing could hurt forever. It was the deepest hour of the night when he arrived, he must have been exhausted, but he wouldn't let you suffer it alone; he held you through every retching spasm on the bathroom floor, his forehead bowed in a prayer between your shoulder blades as he whispered over and over, shh, you're okay, I'm right here, I've got you. His phone was ringing constantly, indignant, buzzing like an angry wasp; there were places he was supposed to be, things he was supposed to do, no, this show could not go on without him. In those days you could scarcely keep up with what each of you were doing when; your stars had risen together but only to take you apart.

"You have to go back, you have to be on set," you told him, resting your burning face on the cool porcelain of the sink.

"No," he said, defiant, "no. I have to be with you."

Sometimes, in your worst moments, you thought, send something to ravage us, let his head be turned, let there be a reason. Don't let it just be this, this infinitesimal tugging at our seams until we come apart, this slow crush of rising water until at last the levee breaks. Don't let us just slip through the hands of the clock, let it be anything but that. You had always comforted yourself that yours was not a story which was altogether human; he had answered things in you which were primal, animal, things that could surely never belong on the surface and be cracked apart there. But time was the hand in which your story had been spun; time had been there first. And time, it seemed, would be there after too.

*

It was December when you stayed in LA with him for the last time, almost a year since Crema. You were in that slow, quiet lull just before New Year, before the world blinked back to life. It was late in his kitchen, and cold, but milk was heating up on the stove, just starting to puff fragrant threads of steam that yielded the smell of cinder toffee. You were wearing one of his sweaters, the coveted one. Nothing else. When you pulled the neckline up to your face his scent bloomed lazily on your skin, warm and marbled with your own. He'd left the softest crush of a bruise on the inside of your thigh, smudged like a lipstick kiss.

His footsteps came steady and familiar down the stairs. There was only the light of the open fridge door when he came and stood beside you, painting you both in strange shades of blue. You split the milk between two chipped mugs, pressed one into his hands, let him brush his finger over the tip of your nose in wordless thanks. He took a sip, put the mug down. Then he looked you in the eye and said softly:

"Are you happy?"

The moment he said it he wrapped his arms around his own waist, as if to brace himself, to hold things together, keep them from spilling out and making a mess. You could have tried to play it off, you could have tried to make it seem casual, a question summoned from the spur of the moment. But it wasn't any of those things, and neither of you could pretend that it was.

"I'm happy when I'm with you."

It sounded smaller when it was said out loud. He closed his eyes, bit his lip as if every word was causing him intense pain. He shook his head, ever so slightly.

"Are you happy?" he said again.

"I'm happy when I'm with you."

Your voice shook, but it was stronger that time; you raised your chin, you didn't look away from him.

"Please don't do this," he said, "Please don't be kind just because it's easier for me. Please."

"You're not making any sense."

"Timmy -"

"I just told you," you said, louder than you meant to. You were breathing hard, your heart racing like you'd run for miles. When you put your mug down it was with shaking hands.

"Okay," he murmured, "okay. You're happy when you're with me. And what happens when you're not with me?"

"Nobody gets." You stopped, swallowed hard. "Nobody gets to be happy all the time." 

You hated the way your voice sounded, hated the way his sounded. You could hear the pain in there, low and unctuous, hungry, famished and feasting on him. He stepped forward and tipped your face up to his, touched you like you were made of glass, like he wanted to memorise the way you felt, in case of a drought later on.

"You're twenty-three," he said, "That's too young to have to think that way."

"Don't make this about my age. Don't do that."

"I'm not, I just -"

"I know you, I know what you're doing in your head. You're twisting everything, you're fucking - making out like you dragged me into this, like I was some innocent kid you corrupted. I chose this, I chose you and when I did that I knew how our jobs would be, how I'd have to deal with being apart from you sometimes. It was my fucking decision. And -"

He ran his fingertips over your cheek so gently that you fell into an immediate, stunned silence. 

"I care about you too much to ignore this," he whispered, "I see what this is doing to you, Timmy. How tired you look, how worried you are, how you're always counting down to the next goodbye. And every time I see that, I think about how it was in Crema and I-"

You shook your head furiously. 

"Please just stop, I don't even know why we have to -"

"We have to because it matters," he said fiercely. His chest was heaving, you were breathing so tightly against each other, the space between your bodies alive and frantic with feeling, sparking like a current about to ignite. "Because it matters, because you matter, because I fucking care, because I want you to be happy."

He stopped, breathless. He wasn't touching your face any more; he had one hand on each side of your body, framing you against the wall. You were close enough to fight, close enough to touch, it would be so easy, to just reach out and feel him. You ran your hand over his chest, felt the heat of him, rolling off his skin in waves. Slid your thigh just a little against his, heard his breath catch, saw the way his gaze jumped to your lips, cut away fast. He shook his head.

"Doesn't make it go away," he murmured.

He swallowed hard, resisting himself, but he couldn't hide from you, you knew all of his little giveaways like the back of your hand. The jolt of his heartbeat was spiking in his jaw. You leaned up and whispered in his ear:

"Please kiss me." 

When your eyes fluttered shut it was at the same moment his did and for a second your eyelashes threaded together, delicate. The first brush of his lips was so soft, barely a whisper, but you didn't need much. Even the brightest of fires started with a single spark. He never acted as though it was his right to French kiss you, he'd seduce you into it every time: soft kisses, endless and teasing, until you couldn't keep yourself from opening to him. You put your arms around his neck, raising up to pull him deeper until he hooked you around his waist and held you there, locked between the heat of his body and the wall. Things shifted, changed. The cold room became warmer, the muted blue light of the moon on his skin became brighter. You could hear the breeze murmur through the trees outside. Your heartbeats had slid into rhythm, as if to say that this was the flow of life itself, cupped trembling in your hands. He pulled away only for breath and clung to you, resting his face against your collarbone, one hand flickering over the inside of your hip under his sweater. You stroked the side of his face, his hair, kissed his neck. 

"Tell me," you breathed in his ear, "tell me that's not enough."

He made a soft sound in his throat, buried his face in your neck. For a long time after that you were quiet, clinging to each other, until he whispered shakily, I don't want to lose you, I can't lose you. Then you soothed him like a child, murmuring into his hair, shh, stop, you're not losing me. No one is losing anyone, okay, we're right here. We're right here.

On the wall the clock betrayed you, marching implacably on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a timeline of all the main events so far:
> 
> Then
> 
> \- Spring 2016 - the boys meet on set (Chapter 1)  
> \- January 2017 - they make things official at Sundance (Chapter 2)  
> \- December 2017 - Timmy takes Armie home for Christmas (Chapter 3)  
> \- Mid-January 2018 - Armie tells Timmy he loves him "very much. All the time" (Chapter 5)  
> \- End of January 2018 - the press tour ends and the long-distance chapter of their relationship begins (Chapter 5)  
> \- June 2018 - Armie comes to NYC for three weeks to see Timmy (Chapter 6)  
> \- September 2018 - "Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just too sensitive." (Chapter 6)  
> \- December 2018 - "Are you happy?" (Chapter 6)
> 
> Now
> 
> \- October 2019 - the Kindle conversation (Chapter 3)  
> \- Early November 2019 - "You're sick, aren't you?" (Chapter 4)  
> \- Late November 2019 - Timmy smokes and thinks about Armie (Chapter 6)


	7. Sweater, Model's Own

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We begin at the end. But when we end, we might just be beginning again...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much to everyone who is reading, commenting, subscribing...you have no idea how much your encouragement helps! I honestly doubt that I could have written this story without it :)
> 
> For those of you who like to listen to music whilst you read, I've written most of Ordinary People whilst under the influence of the album "Co-exist" by The XX, especially these last few chapters. I don't know how to make a playlist because posting on AO3 is apparently about as tech-savvy as I get, but if you're in search of a soundtrack, I can't recommend it enough - it has exactly the dreamy, moody atmosphere that I always try to create, and some of the lyrics are incredibly fitting for this story.
> 
> As always, I hope you enjoy this chapter! The angst is strong as ever, but hope springs eternal as the boys meet for some pre-Christmas drinks...

In reduced circumstances, in hard times, people have to do what it takes to get by. They have to eke out parts of themselves to survive on, accept rations, take scraps and fashion the fabric of a life with them. Expectations have to be revised; gratification has to be delayed. You know this better than anyone. You do this better than anyone.

You arrive early to your shoots. You never miss your flights. You don't complain when schedules overrun and an evening finish slides through to night or midnight or dawn. You say please to the guy who always remembers how you like your coffee and thank you to the lady who puffs your face with powder in between takes. You stop and speak to people who ask for pictures in the street. And when the world seems to reach out and squeeze the breath out of you, you slip away and think about the sound of his laughter against your skin until it loosens enough to keep going.

You do all these things easily, naturally. You do all these things with a smile on your face. All the while inside you, in the hidden chambers of your mind where only you know the twists and turns and tides, these memories play on repeat, your own private screening in rose-tinted hues that over time you fear will turn soft and fade. You've walked your way around them. You've traced the contours of their edges like a tongue feeling the space where a tooth used to be. But you can't avoid them forever, because you remember. You remember Crema. You remember New York and LA and Rome and all the spaces and places in between where you were his and he was yours. You remember how it began. And you remember how it ended, too.

*

The hotel was grander than usual. He was on the seventh floor and in the elevator you could feel eyes moving over you, alive with recognition. It made your skin hot and itchy, as if you'd spent too long in the sun. It was early Spring. The season had been chosen badly: this was when things were supposed to get started, not finished.

He opened the door to his room before you could knock and when he saw you the look on his face melded into one of concern, soft and immediate. He had the most expressive eyes; they could hide nothing from you: he was worried. It had been nearly a month apart this time and you knew how you looked; flat, like a battery clinging to the last drops, flickering out. He didn't look much better. When he put his hand out and cupped your cheek, you swayed into the touch and closed your eyes. 

You don't remember going to the bed, but he kept up a steady trail of murmured affection in your ear the whole time: hey look, it's my sweet Timmy tea, how about that? How are you doing? Not so good, huh? Well, let's see what we can do. The sheets were soft and clean, but the scent was unfamiliar; you traded them for the crook of his neck instead, which always smelled just right no matter what. His soft space was there, as silken as ever, and the patch of stubble that he always missed just below it. It was reassuring to think of him travelling all around the world, making his same harmless little mistake in every place along the way. It had reassured you when you first met him too, but in a different way: look, proof that even Mr Hollywood isn't perfect all the time. It was absurd to think that once you had been intimidated by him. How could he ever have been a stranger to you?

After a while he pulled the sheets up over you both, so you were curled away in your own little cocoon. The late afternoon sunlight pierced through and painted him a thousand shades of gold. It was warm under there, cosy; there wasn't much air. You had to breathe him instead. He didn't reach out to kiss you, or undress you, but he never once lifted his gaze from you, and slowly you became naked in an entirely different way. Deep inside you could feel the place that ran on empty in his absence just starting to glow, the softest signs of life. The look on his face had shifted by then; there was such an intensity of compassion in his eyes that you had to glance away. It was as if he was saying, I see you, I know you're sinking, I won't let you drown. Even if what comes next feels a lot like it. 

That was when he spoke. He whispered, sweetheart, against your hair like a caress. He didn't say that to you very often; he didn't save it for the pretty moments, either, despite the soft edges of the word. You associated it with moments of skin-stripping intimacy. You could count on one hand the number of times he'd used it: once when he held you after you were turned down for a role after reading for it three times; once just before your first ever Oscars ceremony when you'd been burning up with nerves. Once when you woke up in heart-pounding terror from a nightmare, locked against his chest as he murmured, shhh, sweetheart, it's not real. Wake up now, it's okay, it's not real. This time there was nothing to wake up from, no alternate version to escape to. He whispered it again, quietly: 

"Sweetheart."

Then he said:

"I can't keep doing this to you."

He had an expression on his face that you couldn't identify. Now you know it only too well. It's the way he looks when he's trying to be brave.

*

"I want more for you," he told you. He held both your hands in his. "I don't want you to live in the gaps like this."

The sunset had come on quickly, and his face looked exhausted held in the long dark fingers of the shadows. 

"You could be with anyone," he said, "Anyone you want. Someone who doesn't fly halfway around the world every other week. Someone who's always there to come home to."

"What about you?"

"Me?" he asked blankly. 

"Yes, you. You don't ever think about yourself. Is this way better for you?"

He scrubbed his cheek with one hand, looked away.

"I'll be happy when you're happy," he said.

His voice was steady, but the tone of it; it made you think of a believer being forced to blaspheme. You cupped his face and said, look at me, knowing he wouldn't be able to help but obey. That was the thing about being kind; sometimes it had to travel on the wings of a little cruelty. When you had his gaze, you told him:

"You're it for me."

He squeezed his eyes shut, but in the split second before it you saw the words hit home, saw the sharp spark of hope kick up to the surface like a hand reaching up from under water. Then in an instant it was gone.

"No," he said, "no, don't say that. I'm not, Timmy. There will be others."

You would have liked to have been angry. You would have liked an implosion of fireworks inside you, the splintering freeze of a cold fury; even the poisonous simmer of resentment would have been better, leaving only scorched earth in its wake. Or else there could have been tears, whether a stream or a flood, a choke or a sob: let the words drown like laughter in a crowded room. But the truth was that your mind betrayed you; it understood, it accepted. You were his bottom line. He would never allow you to have second best; he could not abide it. Not even if he had decided that having second best meant having him.

*

In the night you ended as you had begun: innocent, entwined, your bodies facing each other to let the push-pull of your breathing flow into one smooth wave. You woke only when you felt his warmth slip away from you. He was sitting on his side of the bed, up against the headboard, his face bathed by the pale glow of the moon. You crawled over into his lap. Who knew if such things were allowed any more, but he didn't stop you; he wrapped his arms around your waist to hold you in place. When you spread your palm beneath his jaw he rested there for a moment, breathed deep, sighed.

"This is going to hurt," he said quietly, "and part of you is going to hate me for doing this to us."

"No. No, I could never -"

"You can," he said, smiling, "You can and you will. That's just how these things go. But one day - not tomorrow, not the next day. Maybe not even next year. But one day, you'll look back at this, you'll look back at what we had - what we have \- and it won't be ugly and twisted to you, because we didn't let it ever become that. Because it deserves so much better than that. Because I love you enough to let you go. You'll look back and it will still be good, it will still be beautiful. And when that moment comes, I will know that I did right by you, and that's all that ever mattered to me."

You nodded. If you had tried to speak the words would only have been eclipsed by tears. He stroked your hair gently, lingered.

"Remember when we were just friends?" you said shakily, and you both laughed, rested your foreheads together to share the spill of the moonlight over your skin.

"I remember," he said, "It was so good even then."

"It was perfect," you whispered.

"It can still be that," he said, "We can still be that. We can still be friends."

You nodded. 

"Maybe it's not never," he whispered, "Maybe it's just not now."

But the way he held you, you knew it was goodbye.

*

Three weeks before Christmas and New York is so cold that the air bites with fierce teeth as soon as you step outside. It's humid in the hotel bar though, mist hanging low like smoke from the heat of bodies, even as it gets later, quieter, intimate in the private bubble of your booth. The moody glow of the light clings to him possessively, picks out the intensity of his eyes, sketches shadows around the lush swell of his lower lip when he bites it for a moment. His fingers on the wine glass are long and elegant. You remember the strength in them well. 

You don't get together like this very often, but today the stars aligned. You were in the city, he was in the city; neither of you would want to pass like ships in the night. Besides, everyone knows the rules now, the lines are neatly drawn: friends. Not now. Not never. You must linger in the spaces in between. But it's not illicit, you're not a secret, he's not a forbidden fruit. You still get to have a taste, if you want. And yes, perhaps it feels a little false to sit like this - neat, well-assembled, polite - when you have traced the path of each other's ragged edges so many times before. Perhaps it makes you feel like children, called in from outside and stuffed into their Sunday best, skins still streaked beneath with the grime of rebellion from hours playing in the forest before. And maybe, just maybe there are some compromises you have to make, some instincts you have to bite down hard on. Maybe there are parts of you that are starving. Maybe you can't stroke your fingertips feather-light over the inside of his wrist and see if it still makes him shiver. Maybe you can't lick the stain of the wine from his lips and seek the taste of him beneath. Maybe you can't hear him moan your name in that wrecked way he always did right before he came, the word dissolving at the edges as his body followed.

But no one can have everything, can they.

Across the table he's talking, low and animated. You've kept your promises: this friendship that once seemed so impossibly entwined with your hearts has proven itself to be stronger, brighter than you dared to hope. It has sifted itself out of the dust gradually, like a fossil rising to the surface of the earth, becoming clearer and cleaner every time you've tentatively reached out in the darkness to ease in a little more light. Now he asks you questions, about what comes next with work, about your mom and dad and sister, about the co-producer on your last movie, because he heard he's an asshole. Then he tells you about work, about the weekend he looked after his Godchildren, about the new colour he painted the living room in LA, about the book he just read and how you should read it too, you'd definitely like it; a whole beautiful laundry list of pieces in his life for you to stitch together. Sometimes he doesn't explain things quite right, and then he says, you know what I mean. Such a casual phrase, but the sentiment of it runs deeper; it means you understand me, it means we don't need words. Once you used to ask him to talk to you like this whilst you fell asleep. I don't know what to say, he'd laugh. Just anything, you'd reply, Tell me what you had for lunch. It doesn't need to be important. Just tell me something. Now you think that you want to hear him talking to you like this before you die. 

The wine bottles form a neat bridge across the table between you, but the bowl of bar snacks stays mostly full. You notice that, because it's so unlike him. Once upon a time he would have gleefully drained them, then charmed the waitress into replenishing them on tap for the rest of the night. You study the contours of his body, letting your eyes skim in casual glances. There's just a little more give in his clothes, you can see it, you've held that body over you enough times to know. Yet the hunger in him is unmistakeable; it's the way stray animals look hungry, around their eyes, where they're missing a home. 

"You look thinner," you say.

"You look just the same," he says, smiling.

"I'm serious."

"Maybe LA's finally going to my head," he shrugs. But you don't think it's that at all. 

He glances away across the bar, revealing the smooth bronze canvas of his neck and throat, the hollow of his collarbone. He's sensitive there; you used to kiss the skin, so softly, and feel him melt against you, trusting. You could take a picture of him right now and he would look at ease anywhere; he could belong in the pages of GQ. But you hate the way he looks in magazines, you hate the lie of it: cool and aloof, that assertive jut of the chin, the long indifferent stance of his body. It seems unfair to you, cruel even, that the world has clothed a man of such softness and feeling in a body that looks too tough and hard to care.

His fingers brush the inside of his jacket, where he sometimes keeps a packet of cigarettes, restless; he wants one, you can tell. Red wine always did make him want to smoke, amongst other things. You wait until he looks back at you. Then you ask:

"Would you do something for me?" 

"Okay," he says, carefully.

"Call me sweetheart," you say, "the way you used to do."

His eyes flick up to yours, dark, liquid. He doesn't look surprised, but you are shocked at yourself: the nerve, the longing, the sheer daring of your words, dredging up the past like anchors lifting from the sea. You'd like to say to him, see what this has done to me, see how this love has pushed me outside the lines, how it won't play by the rules, but no, stop, you've said enough already, you've said too much already. 

"I can't," he whispers.

Your knee brushes his under the table, or his brushes yours. Neither of you shift away.

"Why not? It's just a word, isn't it? I didn't even like it until you. It's just a word."

"No," he says. His voice is stormy, intense. "It's not. You know it's not."

He shakes his head. Then he looks at you, looks into you. You see something strung tight in his eyes slip and fall away. He says:

"It's the way I feel."

Your heartbeat skips, then clutches in your chest, hot and fast. 

"Feel?" you whisper.

Feel, not felt. Don't let it be felt; don't let it be past tense. Let it still be very much, all the time. You can see the flush rising on his neck, smudging over his cheekbones. He swallows hard, puts his hand over his mouth as if to push that lethal slip back inside. His pulse is ticking minutely in his wrist; he knows just what you're asking, he could see the path unwinding, spiralling to this very moment from the second you opened your mouth: it wasn't the word you wanted, but the softness and sentiment that lay behind it, like the sharp edge of a language that lags on the tongue. He nods, once.

"Feel," he says. 

The word is slick with guilt, carrying weight so far beyond its moment in the mouth: a universe condensed into a single syllable. You look at each other and in your mind you think, complicit, you're complicit in this. You can be complicit in keeping dirty secrets, you can be complicit in a crime; no one is ever complicit in anything good, are they? And yet still it feels so good; it's a sweet lick of honey knocking on the window of a bitter day. 

"I didn't - I shouldn't have," he says, "I just - I wasn't thinking and I. I'm sorry."

"You were just honest."

"I was honest, yes," he says, "but -"

"Then I'm not sorry," you say, "Even if you are. I'm not sorry at all."

You lean back in your chair, smile at him. You sit together quietly, sated. No more words required now you've heard the only one that matters.

*

Outside his hotel, the night is crystal clear and icy, crowned with a thin sliver of silver moon in the sky. The skyscrapers hold themselves tight and tall against the chill. You're shivering with cold, feeling the tingling fingers of the alcohol much harder now, making everything blurry, far away. He won't let you take the subway home; he makes you stand in the lobby of the bar, says, look at you, you're freezing. He orders you a cab, rolling his eyes when you protest; familiar, you used to bitch at each other like this when you were a couple. The instinct slips back on like a glove, even after all this time. When the car comes he opens the door for you, waits until you're inside, then leans in and smudges a kiss to your cheek. Heat blooms on your skin, burns as though he's branded you. Let me know you get home safe, he murmurs.

The cab pulls away, suffused with the scent of him: wine, his cologne, your skin. Strange, you'd never noticed that, how his scent is half yours, as if you touched a fingertip to his DNA and left an imprint there, like a dare. When he slammed the door you heard his keys jingle in his pocket. In your hazy state, you watch the lights shimmer by and wonder if he ever changed the alarm code in his house, if you could still slip through the door and feel the walls sigh out we missed you, we remembered you, no one here forgot you. You'd like to know if you could still get close, you'd like to know if you can still get inside. It's the same impulse that made you take his coveted sweater that last morning in the hotel room, right before you left each other. You didn't have to ask, but when you picked it up he still nodded at you, slowly, painfully. Two days later when you did a photo spread for Vanity Fair you were still wearing it. You'd surprised yourself: already you had attained this stark, bland functionality; you were like the screen of a heart monitor in the seconds just after the last waves flicker and flatten, leaving only hope behind. 

The photographer loved the sweater. It looked so cool the way you wore it too big, it was so insouciant, so you. Maybe you'd keep it on, just for a few shots. He stood you under the moonlight glare of the spotlights just so and said, look sad, Timmy, look soulful. Think about something intimate. Think about something close to home. You peeled back a single corner of yourself for him, like tugging out the first in a long line of stitches, so you only bled a little bit. Great, he said, perfect, he got the perfect shot. A few days later your agent sent you through the pictures. You remember they'd already started to add in the little blurb in the corner, printed neatly in white: jacket, Armani. Sneakers, Gucci. Sweater, model's own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You actually read the last part of the break-up scene in the very first chapter, but it probably wasn't fully clear to you then:
> 
> "Instead, you nudge the time line along just a little and think about standing outside the hotel room with him that last time. He'd had his bag over his shoulder, full of all the little pieces of himself that he was taking away with him. He was keeping his hands busy, you'd noticed, because whenever he didn't they started to shake. Meanwhile you had been still, quiet, like a stone when it gets to the bottom of a lake. The click of the door closing behind you was solid, conclusive. Final. 
> 
> "How do we do it?" you'd asked, desperately, as if it were a trigger. "How can we be friends?"
> 
> He'd smiled, not his usual smile but something that was trying to be, and looked around to make sure you were alone. Then he took your hand, palm up, and when you understood and held it out for him, he rested his chin in it, the way he always did when he was upset.
> 
> "After all this, Timmy," he said, "after all this, how can we not be?""


	8. Big Bang Theory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can't have New Year's Eve without fireworks...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry I've been delayed with updating again, but here it is at last, the penultimate chapter of Ordinary People! I will probably be slow to update Chapter 9, too. Normally I write a first draft of each chapter, leave it a while to settle, then come back, remodel it and post it. At the moment, I know exactly what happens in Chapter 9, but I don't have a full draft of it yet. I love these boys, and I want to get their ending just right, so I hope you won't mind too much if I take a while to get there. 
> 
> Meanwhile, I know I've said it a hundred times, but it always bears repeating: I can't thank you all enough for your support for this story! You're such a lovely audience to write for and I appreciate it more than I can say.
> 
> On with the show...

In your parents' kitchen on New Year's Eve, the air is rich with the scent of vanilla and coffee, the fancy kind that your mom picks up at Chelsea Market on the weekends. Through the window you can see the apartments opposite, twined with the long thin snakes of steps that run down the buildings in New York like restless thoughts. The sky has drained bone white with cold, but on the horizon, the sunset flickers and turns to flames. It will be a good night for fireworks, clear and open.

Your hands are ghost white with baking flour from helping your mom out, but you don't mind; you need the distraction. You're going to a party with your sister tonight and you're nervous; it helps to keep your hands busy. You spoon out chocolate spread onto a little triangle of dough and paint it right to the edges. Then you roll, roll, and tuck, the way your mom taught you. The rhythm is intensely familiar now, the dough pliable under your hands. Soft as skin.

You don't think about last New Year's Eve. You mustn't.

"You know you could just get caterers to do this for you. No one would ever know," you tell your mom.

She smiles, wrinkles her nose in distaste. Then she says:

"I think it's good that you're going out tonight."

You watch as she sprinkles out hazelnuts on the kitchen counter, plucks a knife from the cutlery drawer and rolls it over them, until they start to crumble into thin sand like sea shells crushing underfoot. There's a pause, small but significant.

"He's in LA," you volunteer, "He was with his family for Christmas and tonight he's visiting his Godchildren. You remember. Liz's kids."

"I didn't even ask..."

"You didn't have to, mom."

"I'm glad he's doing something nice."

"But," you say.

She looks up at you, a splash of flour on her cheek like a rain drop. 

"But he should be with you, Timmy," she says gently.

She opens the oven for a moment, releasing a fragrant cloud of steam that drifts lazily towards the ceiling. Eight months into the aftermath and he's still spoken about in this way: softly, kindly, as part of the family. No one wants to write his name in blood; he isn't an entry in a little black book, smouldering with dark promise; he's not the monster under anyone's bed. He's just gone, lost. Longed for. And when you come for dinner, no one talks about the empty seat to your right.

"I know," you say, "But thinking about it doesn't make it any -"

Your phone buzzes on the counter, fogs over from the steam. You smudge the screen clean with your thumb, offhand, then startle and stare.

Can't stand the silence.

Four words, but there's only one person in the world who would ever send them to you. You try to scrub your smile away with the back of your hand down your cheek, but it sticks, pushing up from a place inside you that still bathes in the light. Your mother glances at you, then dusts icing sugar like snow, an expression of serene omniscience on her face. When you reply, you skip the next line for the ones that matter:

Grow up. I'll call you at midnight.

*

On the subway the breeze jumps through the carriages in quick, hot gusts. Your sister's hair catches in its fingertips and swirls in dark silk scarves around you. It's an old train, scuffed around the edges and dusty. Sometimes the lights flick on and off at random, and in the flashes of darkness your mind paints pictures, memories that wash up on the shore of your thoughts like snatches of conversation rising through an open window. You don't think about last New Year's Eve. You mustn't.

Your sister distracts you, ruffles your hair, smoothes one fingertip over your eyebrow. 

"Look at those perfect arches," she says, quirking one of her own. 

You know what she's doing: smuggling kindness in under the disguise of idle chatter, speaking a soothing touch to the frayed end of your nerves. The way she loves you is so much like the way he did; easy assurance, unquestioning, unconditional. He had felt like family before anything else.

"Boys always have the longest eyelashes too," she says. Then she looks at you, touches your cheek. "This one has sad eyes, though."

You suck in a breath, through the quick sting in your chest. This is how you are these days: softer, easy to hurt, one wrong move and everything floods to the surface. You think about the dough in your mom's kitchen; so often you feel the same now, pushed pale and ragged, you wish his hands would tear you apart, tenderly, and reshape you into someone tougher, stronger. But if he had the chance, would he? Didn't he think all of you was perfectly fine, didn't he tell you so? That total acceptance; how you crave it now.

Your sister reaches up and hugs you.

"You know, we don't have to go to the party," she says.

You put your arms around her, play along. It feels like being kids again, making up stories when you huddled under the covers during a summer storm.

"Okay," you say, "what shall we do instead?"

"We could go on, on a..." she stops to think about it. "A sibling adventure. Just you, me and the mean streets of New York."

You both laugh. Her hair - which she spent so long on this afternoon - still looks pretty, despite the subway's best efforts. You tell her so. Then you say that it's okay, you don't mind going to the party, you're sure it will be fine when you get there, really. The uneasy breeze rushes through again. The lights flicker on, off, out. Why are you still wearing all those clothes? you'd asked, kissing him. But you don't think about that. You mustn't.

*

At the party you feel fleeting eyes on you when you move through the room, curious, weighted with intent. Then there's a stranger holding out his hand, strong grip, wide open smile, tan California skin. You don't ask, but he tells you his name. Daniel. Daniel from Washington Heights, it turns out. Friend of a friend, so you have to be polite. Big dark eyes, the kind that could look moody and intense if you were interested, if you were searching them for traces of desire. Daniel's got two younger sisters, he tells you. Mom's a teacher. Dad's a doctor. Must run in the blood, because Daniel's in his second year of pre-med at Colombia.

Daniel could take you out for a drink, if you wanted, some time?

You don't think about last New Year's Eve. Instead, you think about how there must be something inside you, some traitorous rebellion of your flesh which has marked you out to others as available, opened an eye against the keyhole of a locked door. It was impossible, you had thought, when just three weeks ago you sat in that bar and saw the traces of yourself scattered on him like footprints in the snow, felt his presence still painted all over you, spelling out one word: mine. You had thought him indelible on your skin then, permanent. Can he really have faded so fast?

You swipe your palm across your forehead as if to scrub the thoughts away, shake yourself back into the here and now. Then you smile and run your hand through your hair and say hey, that's cool of him to ask, it really is, but your job right now, it's just so crazy, you can't take anyone along for the ride. And actually, look at the time, half past eleven, almost midnight already. You're sorry but you should go, you have to go. You have to call a friend, just an old friend. That's all.

*

Up on the roof the music throbs beneath you like a heartbeat. Glimpses of conversations bounce up from the streets below, but by the time they reach you, the echoes of laughter have contorted, become strange and eerie. You take comfort in the constellation of the city lights instead, a steady tide of shimmering rose and amber.

Twenty minutes to midnight. He answers on the first ring. 

"Hey," he says warmly, "What did I do to deserve an early phone call?"

"It's just...I just."

You stop there, choked, don't know how to say any of it. You're more keyed up than you realised, shivering even through your jacket, a thin film of goosebumps rising on your skin. Meanwhile, he sounded relaxed when he answered the phone, you could hear the smile in his voice. Why don't you just let him be, why do you always have to push, have to come and make things difficult for him? It was reckless, you think now, stupid to call without stopping to process first, to think about how to handle this.

"It was this guy and it - you know what, it doesn't even matter."

Dead silence on the other end of the line. He's not breathing. Then:

"What did he do?"

His voice right now, it sounds the same way those traces of you on his skin look. 

"He just - it was stupid, he just asked if I wanted to go for a drink, that's all."

Silence again, but he takes a deep breath, the way people do before slipping underwater.

"It doesn't matter," you tell him, "I said no."

"You should go," he says.

You wish you could see his face, so that you would know if he's being brave again.

"What? Go - go where?"

"On a date. With him. You should go."

Your heart stops pumping blood and replaces it with some other substance, viscous, which freezes in every vein until you are just so much ice, standing clenched like a fist over the city. When you speak, your voice doesn't sound like your own, your mind doesn't feel like your own. Insidious intruders have taken command of your control room, and they are smashing down on all the buttons whilst you hide shaking from the chaos.

"Is that what you want?" you hear yourself saying. This new voice you have, it's low, dangerous, like the forbidden flash of a knife hidden in someone's sleeve. "Is that really what you want? You want to let it go, you want to let us go? And then, what, in five, ten years, we'll look back and -"

"Don't do this," he says. 

There's a pleading edge to his voice. It hurts you to hear it, but it's like a burn at the end of a distant limb: you know it's there, but you can't let it consume you until later, because you don't want him polite any more, you don't want him well-behaved and appropriate; you want all of it, the whole glorious mess of him. You want him fractured, you want him honest, you want the part of him that he's afraid to look in the eye.

"You remember this time last year," you say. It's not a question.

"You know I do, but it just, it gets us nowhere," he says, "Please don't. Don't."

"You said that," you whisper, "That's exactly what you said then."

And you close your eyes, and you think about last New Year's Eve.

*

The starlight flicker of the movie on TV over his face. One hand tangled in the back of your t-shirt where he was pulling you against him, because you hadn't undressed, not really; couldn't wait. It had crept up on you both from thin air: you reached to get him another beer and when he kissed your shoulder you knew what he was asking. Everything else clicked away like a light shutting off.

The couch was far too small for both of you. You'd pushed the cushions to the floor, knocked over the bottle of wine on the coffee table as you bent to adorn the inside of his thigh with kisses. Mostly empty, but still there'd been the docile chug, chug, chug of the wine spilling lazily, rhythmic, moving in time with his snatched breaths, and him whispering hotly, "please don't, don't", afraid you'd stop to stem the flow. As if you ever could have with him laid out like a banquet beneath you. 

Later there were the fireworks reflecting in through the window, painted in soft, fluid pastels over his body. You chased them with your mouth, hungry for any way to travel his skin, but you couldn't hear them, couldn't hear anything but his soft sounds over you, and then that pearl of a confession tumbling from his mouth: I need you, I need you so much. You'd understood right then how it would go, how in the morning he'd slip back into the parts of himself he trusted, like a well-worn glove, composed, confident. It didn't matter, because in the moment he wasn't any of those things; he was soft, shaken, yours. No sooner he had said it then you both shattered apart, your body anchored to the earth only by the perfect weight of his.

After you'd taken him to bed, leading him by his hand, speaking only to whisper in his ear: why are you still wearing all those clothes? You kissed him before he could answer, stripped both of you bare, but it wasn't the blankets he needed after; you kept him warm with your body heat instead. His skin, which had felt hot and thirsty on the couch, was cool and quenched against the sheets, but he was somewhere outside himself, suspended in the quiet magic that only you knew how to conjure in him. You travelled the golden valley of his spine from root to tip with one finger, chased it with your mouth to feel the shiver that rippled behind your touch, until you were tasting the salt and softness of his neck. You're so beautiful, aren't you, you murmured, felt the soft flood of heat blooming in his skin before you saw it. He turned and nuzzled in under your chin, eyelashes fluttering closed, cupped on the cusp of sleep. You knew a thousand ways to get him there: lips brushing over the beauty mark that perched on the inside of his collarbone like a full stop at the end of breathless prose, fingertips tracing through the baby hairs at his temple until his breath became a low, steady purr. It was only when he was closer to dreams than waking that you looked at the clock on the bedside table. The numbers blinked back owlishly: 1.03am. You didn't rouse him to say happy new year, didn't need to; it had no presence, no meaning. You were in the only place in the world where time didn't exist.

*

On the roof you're saying to him:

"Is that what you want, you want us to give those parts of ourselves to someone else? That's okay with you?"

There's a dark fury in your voice now; the better to cover the slick stab of jealousy that runs evergreen through the heart of every word you say: that you could not bear it if he were to yield that softness to someone else; if he were to reach into you, take back that part of himself which beats safely alongside your own heart and place it naked and helpless in a stranger's hands. Something vital inside you would jettison to dust; you'd never know the taste of rapture again.

"No," he's saying, "no, no, none of this is okay with me."

"Then - then what are you saying? Is it just, is it just no big deal? Do you even miss us? Does this make you happy? Is this easy for you?"

"Easy?" he says, "Are you - Do you have any fucking idea what it was like for me to tell the most important person in my whole world to go?"

"Tell me," you demand.

You hear him snap through the house to a quiet room, let the door slam behind him when he closes it because at last he can't hold back; because at last this dam is breaking, breaking.

"Everything, everything changed for me when I met you," he says raggedly, "I changed. I had never, never loved someone that way before, never needed someone to be okay even if I wasn't, even if it meant I wasn't. Can you see that? Do you understand what that means, Timmy?"

He doesn't wait for you to reply before he goes on. Now you've finally opened this door, everything inside it is unravelling like night over a dawn sky.

"And yes," he says, "yes, I miss you. I go mad with it. I miss you when I wake up and reach for you and the other side of the bed is stone cold. I miss you when I go to pick out a sweater and the one I'm looking for is right where I left it because you aren't around to take them any more. I miss you when I'm in the shower and I turn the water off because for a moment I forget why I can't hear you outside, why you're not there with me. I miss you when I walk past crime novels in the bookstore and wonder if you've read them yet. I miss you when I get sick and you're not there to make me drink that disgusting homemade flu remedy your mom taught you which I hate but which always worked. And I miss you when I remember every kiss, every touch, every time you fell apart in my arms in every bed in every city where I ever slept with you. I miss you all the time, Timmy."

You taste salt. Tears. You swipe them away with the back of your hand, and say:

"I'm here. I'm here." Like talking someone through a bad dream.

Five minutes to midnight.

"I could come to New York right now," he says, "and we could fall into each other all over again and I could love it, love you, love every second, feel like we bottled all the light in the world, the way I always do, the way I always will when I'm with you. But you forget, I am the only other person in the world who knows exactly how high we go when we're together and how fucking agonisingly low it is when we're apart. Because in three days time I fly to Toronto and then it's, it's just the hours and the days and the weeks and the months draining you all over again. So no, I'm not happy. So maybe this way everything is bland, and flat, and the colours don't look the same, and I try but nothing ever really gets through this fog I'm standing behind. Maybe all that is true. But the only thing, the only thing that makes me more unhappy than this is being the person who steals the sun out of your sky every time I tell you I have to go."

Midnight. The fireworks begin as the new year unfolds from the sky like a staircase, cracking the shell of it apart, every jagged edge studded a mosaic of riotous colour that rises and falls without end. Sparks sizzle and hiss against the shock of the cold, fading into thin wisps of smoke that are overlaid at once with the next wave of shimmering fire. It's still early where he is; the sky he stands under is as silent and secretive as the surface of a lake. Time has such clever ways of reminding you of the lines that divide. 

In the silent, cavernous aftermath - punctuated only by the muted flare of fireworks still rising in the distance - he says:

"I would give it up for you."

"What?"

"Acting. I would stop."

There's a steel certainty in his voice and for a moment you forget to breathe. Then you stutter:

"You - you don't mean that, you can't."

"Why not?" he asks, "I'd come to New York. We used to talk about it, didn't we? About me writing, producing. Something more stable."

"Yeah, I mean, but that was - we were talking five, ten years down the line. When you wanted to slow down, when you were ready."

You say the words, and yet still temptation twines through your blood, winds serpentine around your spine and squeezes.

"I can sit in every single bar in New York and tell you I still want you," he says quietly, "but what does it change? Nothing, that's the whole point, Timmy. This is never going to be easy, we are never going to be easy. There's no magic solution that's going to just...knock on the door and let us have everything. If we want this then something has to give, someone has to compromise. So I'm telling you now, I will. I will, for you."

"Don't," you whisper, and what you really mean is don't tempt me like this, don't put that chance in front of me. Because if I had to break you just a little bit, if that's what it took to have you with me, maybe I would, maybe I'm not good like you.

You swallow hard, shake your head as if to banish the thoughts. Then you say:

"No. No, I won't make you do that. Acting is, it's more than a job to you; you would be half a person without it. And I want all of you, I need all of you."

"You're not making me do anything -"

"No," you say, firmer now, "there has to be a better way, there has to be. It can't just be you giving everything up, I don't want that. You deserve more than that."

He sighs. If he were here now, he'd hold you, he'd kiss you; neither of you could resist it any more. But he can't do that when he's on the other end of the phone line, can't do that when he's always so far away. Instead he says:

"Just think about this, okay? Please. For both of us. Just think about what I said."

When he's gone you stand and look out over the skyline for a long time. You don't feel the cold, don't feel much of anything beyond the tumult of your own mind. Fireworks sparkle and roar around you, soaring with misplaced elation. There's a sound in your head, your heart pounding in a rhythm you don't recognise, like a drum beat: find a way. 

You have got to find a way.

*

You flatline through January, tugged from one coast to the other for work. You land at LAX, gain three hours, swing back through New York like the pendulum of a clock, lose them again. Once you used to savour the thrill of the new, feel the wanderlust inside you spike to new heights every time the wheels of the plane touched down in an unknown city. Yet somewhere along the way, it's the taste of home that has become exotic to you, as if you took a wrong turn on the map and reset the compass inside you to point eternally in only one direction.

It's not until February that the edges ease out a little, like the pouting lip of a flower bud yielding to the first taste of spring. At 3am the departure lounge of JFK is quiet and subdued, marked only by the occasional footsteps of lone travellers pacing the empty hallways. The luggage carousel wheels restlessly around, empty of its usual burdens. The old oak planted in the distance sways against a cruel breeze. DELAYED, the boarding screens declare with stubborn monotony, flicking from one list of flights to the next. 

You use the time to pick through a stack of scripts, crumpled and frayed from being packed into the bottom of your bag. You thumb through them the same way you always do: taking each one from the first page, no conclusions, no snap judgments until you've read at least ten minutes' worth of screen time. Still, the options tick by: summer blockbuster, main role, no. Adaptation of a novel, could be interesting, read it again later. You fold over the top corner to remind yourself. The next one just says "Pilot" on the cover page. Netflix, a series. The closest you can ever get to a nine to five, your agent Elle likes to tell you. She wouldn't push you to go for a TV series though; Hollywood loves you, why not ride the wave? That's what she'd say. You're not expecting much, and you're so tired by now that you break your own rules, flick to the middle of the script before you start reading. 

The luggage carousel jams with a tinny whirr, but you don't hear it; you read.

The screen above switches your flight over to BOARDING, but you don't see it yet; you read. 

When you get to the last page you tip your head back and look at the ceiling. You think about the big things in your life: how when you walk into a room, you still feel like that awkward nineteen year old, but people sit up and listen to you, their eyes turn to you before others. How you still like to take the small projects, but somehow they're never small any more once your name's attached to them. How you used to fight for roles that fit you, and now directors write them specifically for you. How people told you to take advantage of every chance that came your way because it might not last, but it did, and it has, and now it's more than you ever dreamed it could be when you were just another hungry kid from the city, reading lines over and over in your bedroom.

Then you think about other things, the little things, the moments in between. You think about how in the morning you'd wake up first and he'd just be a smudge of mussed blonde hair under the covers beside you. How you'd pet him gently and watch the line of his body gravitate slowly over to yours until he was nestled into your chest, his eyelashes tickling you as he blinked slowly awake. How every time the alarm clock burst into life he'd whisper off and off and off and off in his Oliver voice until you'd relent, laughing, and reach over to tap it into silence. How whenever your sister went on a bad date she'd tell him about it and he'd put his arm around her and say, look, if you want me to kill him for you... and she'd laugh, every time. 

Through the window the old oak stands firm. You think about its roots, the way the earth surges under their pressure, how they push through like hands, seeking space to live, to belong. How that must feel, to command a path that way. No magic solution, he said, and you know he's right. But he also said, I'd come to New York, and if there is one golden thread of luck in all of this it is the fact that you already have six weeks of filming there in March, and eight weeks of filming there in October, and if you can find a job to fill the gap in between then maybe, just maybe it will be enough. Maybe it will be a start, a chance to carve out the space to plant a seed and watch it grow again. 

Chance, though; what a thing to rely on, so tempestuous, ripe with the ability to bruise. What are the chances? people ask, to mean: as if, how improbable, dream on. You flip to the first page of the script, not daring to look, drawn tight against the threat of disappointment. You've held your breath like this a hundred times over the last few fruitless weeks, and still you hesitate, still you hope, still you'd like to keep the dream alive. Why draw it out? Anticipation only ever sharpened the knife's edge. 

INT., NEW YORK. 

You blink hard, waiting for the words to shift under the harsh fluorescent lights, disperse and re-shape. Just a trick of the mind, it has to be. It's nearly four in the morning; at this hour, you're allowed to see what you want to see. But you look again, and again, and still they stay the same, blinking up at you benignly. You bite your lip, run your fingertips over the ink to savour the way it thrums with possibility beneath your touch. Then you key through your emails, find the last one from Elle with the scripts attached. Thought these might be interesting! she'd written, bright and breezy, casual. You hit "reply", then backspace until the subject line stares blankly back at you, expectant, waiting. You take a deep breath. Your hands on the screen are steady and sure.

Audition, you type.


	9. Phoenix Rising

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What we've all been waiting for :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, apologies to anyone who read Chapter 8 within the first few hours of me posting it...Ao3 spontaneously deleted a couple of lines of text messages between Timmy and Armie which set the context for their midnight phone call. Armie wrote "can't stand the silence", to which Timmy replied "grow up. I'll call you at midnight". Sorry if you were left confused the first time around!
> 
> Secondly, my traditional apology for taking so ridiculously long to update. Work was insanely busy, plus I got last chapter jitters for a couple of weeks and absolutely hated every word I wrote. Luckily I pushed through that, so here's Chapter 9. As always, I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it is what you wanted for these boys :)

Oscars night. In the long hallways outside the auditorium the air is full of the sound of silk gowns swishing and the high fizz of champagne sparkling in glasses. The deep crimson walls and carpet are plush and saturated, like the secret valleys inside a heart as they fill with blood. Across the hallway, you pick out the shine from a pair of earrings that glimmer the same blue as his eyes and for just a moment your pulse rises.

You find him out on the balcony, watching the moonlight ambling lazily over the horizon. From a distance, the gridlocked tangle of traffic downtown appears as a serene string of lights like pearls across the throat of the city. You stand in the doorway, watch as he undoes his bow tie with a sigh of relief, splays one long-fingered hand through his hair so it becomes soft and tousled again, the way you like it best. Smoke coils in a languid figure eight as he exhales around the stem of a cigarette. It was something you used to fight about, when it became a habit that slipped over into his everyday for a while. You know they've done studies and it's five minutes, you told him once, five minutes off your life for every one. He smiled when you said that. Well, he replied, maybe I'll get lucky and lose all of the five minutes that I don't get to spend with you.

He turns towards the sound of your footsteps, smiles.

"Took you long enough," he says, but he's pleased, you think, pleased that you still know how to find each other's quiet spaces in crowded rooms.

You walk over and kiss him on each cheek, feel him press the palm of his hand against your waist to steady you. He smiles when you draw back the black satin lapel of his jacket knowingly, find the packet of cigarettes tucked in against his chest and pluck one out.

"Nice suit," you say.

"Look who's talking," he replies, gesturing toward yours: crushed velvet this year and gunmetal grey; an armour of sorts. You tug at the collar of your shirt, uncertain.

"My mom described it as a 'bold choice'," you say.

He laughs, shakes his head.

"A vision," he says quietly, "as always."

He must see the way you blush, luminous in the flickering amber of his cigarette as he uses it to light yours, but he doesn't say anything else. You smoke in silence for a while, standing shoulder to shoulder. The first inhale is blissful; the second, better.

"So," he asks, "how's Daniel? Of Washington Heights infamy."

You reach over, push his shoulder gently. You've talked about it since, laughed about it since. He laughs again now.

"I told you, I said no."

You hold the smoke deep in your chest, feel the newborn heat of it flash crimson, breathe out. He catches your eye, says nothing.

"You're jealous, aren't you?"

You don't say it to provoke him; your voice is soft with surprise instead. That he should look upon anyone else and see a threat is, to you, a concept born of impossibility.

"I have no right," he says, shaking his head, but the smoke betrays him, swirling a hopeful loop like a question mark through the air. You swallow hard.

"I haven't," you say quietly, "There hasn't been anyone else. Not since you."

Doubtless there are others who could push the same buttons he did, but who could ever hope to do it with that total kindness and acceptance of everything your body was and did when it was near him, when it needed him? It's not a killer move or a clever flick of the wrist. It can't be taught. He only nods, slowly, exhales smoke again like a sigh of relief. Looking out over the city like this, his profile is beautiful, wreathed luxuriously in smoke. Stars sparkle in the valley of sky held just beyond the flutter of his eyelashes. 

"I might be in New York a little more," he says carefully, "for work. I don't know yet for sure."

His voice is steady, but when he turns and looks at you his eyes are burning low, urgent. It's a sharp tool, to affect someone the way you do each other; powerful. You have to remember to always use it gently, to always use it well.

"I might be in New York more too," you say.

You both know that you can't say any more yet, that you're still, after all this time, condemned to hang in the balance a little while longer. Yet it's a balm to hear that he's fighting for this as hard as you are, that you're both trying to find a way: pushing the scales in one direction even with the dark knowledge that when all the toil has been done and all the sweat has been shed, they might still land in the other. It's a hazard of the job, always will be, but you'll give each other no false promises, no false starts. Even now, you remember how to be careful with one another's hearts. 

"Okay," he whispers, nodding, "okay." 

You're quiet for a while, watching the night blur behind a smudged veil of smoke. In the depths of the building behind you, you can hear the distant chiming of laughter, glasses being filled, the snap and crackle of gossip being passed from hand to hand. Hollywood loves to talk, and soon you might be missed amongst the crowd. Dangerous, but you can't bring yourself to care; the night leads you calmly in its own direction.

"And you?" you murmur.

He doesn't look at you, doesn't have to. He knows what you're asking.

"No one else," he says softly, shakes his head, "Faithful to you."

You reach out then, crush the amber eye of your cigarette against the railing. The last ember winks out like a shooting star. He doesn't resist you when you take his too: satisfying one craving does nothing to quench the other. You trace his jaw in your hand, hesitant until he closes his eyes and leans into your touch. It's only then that you let your fingers splay over the side of his face, relishing his scent, his softness, the rolling tide of his heartbeat where it traces an undying rhythm beneath the heat of his skin. He sighs against the inside of your palm, almost a moan as your fingers trail over the sharp cut of his cheekbone, lingering now. His hand is unsteady when it covers yours. You stay that way for a long time.

*

Spring comes slowly this year, sliding in between the bars of winter to smooth away its rough edges with eager hands. The first flowers crown stubbornly through the snow, jewel-bright and triumphant in their new skins as their stems rise above the frost still lying beneath. In the streets you see changing faces, and doors to apartments that stay open from morning to night as the contents of one house are picked up and funnelled into the heart of another, filling the veins of the city with fresh blood.

Tonight the air stays soft after sunset for the first time this year, swayed by the distant promise of the long days and bright, star-lit nights that summer will bring. In your galley kitchen, the low breeze trails its wandering fingertips through the window and flutters the pages of the calendar that hangs on the wall, a relic from the person who lived here before you. Once you toyed with taking it down, but now you like to mark the path of time in this way, you like to see it taken in its invisible essence and made material before your eyes. 

Go to it now, through your bedroom, past the book case in the living room where your fingertip trails a path along the spine of each book, over the floorboard in the hallway that always creaks. It is April this month, and the picture above the neat rows of dates is of Central Park in early bloom. The calendar is dotted all over with your winding cursive, but your eye is drawn to two dates in particular whenever you are near. On the 18th it says, audition, and then the time and place. On the 25th, it says only dinner. You don't need to remind yourself who it's with. There are some things you don't forget.

*

Five minutes before they call you in to read for your part, you stand in the bathroom, watching as water soaks onto the corner of your script on the sink beside you. You shake it away, but not before the ink of your endless annotations feathers at the edges, fraying where it curls ornately around the uniform lines of typing. It is the same copy you read in the airport all those weeks ago, but now it is tabbed, highlighted, learned, revered. You have carried it with you as others carry holy scripture, recited it as if it were a prayer, touched your fingers to its ink as if it is a talisman capable of delivering you to heaven's gates.

You look in the mirror over the sink, take deep breaths to try and settle the fierce pulse of your heartbeat. It's almost time to go, time to step up and try. You've never been much good at soothing yourself though; it was always him who knew just what to say when you were worried before an audition. If you close your eyes now, you can still sink back beneath the surface, see yourself lying on his chest on the couch. You don't remember whether it was winter or summer, a movie or a play; the details have faded like the print of old newspapers. It's the feeling you remember, the way he had zipped you up into his hoodie with him, made you laugh. The cave of his chest offered a velvet darkness, immersed in the scent of him. You nestled into it hungrily, loving the way that the closeness of your bodies rendered you indivisible, required you to slip into sync. The heat of his palm was huge and shocking in its softness when it settled beneath your t-shirt, in the tender arch at the small of your back. 

"What if I don't get it?" you whispered.

There was an edge to your voice, a question there: you didn't want to be placated, you didn't want to be force fed the platitudes that everyone else insisted on, the ones that left a film like cheap soap in your mouth. You wanted the truth. He didn't disappoint. He held you tighter, leaned in to kiss the crescent curve of your neck, breathed there so his voice could warm you from the outside in. 

"Well," he said, "then there will still always be this."

*

"Five days is nothing," Elle says, "Five days is too early to call it one way or the other."

You left the audition feeling good: no stuttering, no stumbling, you remembered every word. We'll be in touch, they said, smiling, and waved you out the door into the blue-skied elation of sheer relief. The days passed slowly at first, unnoticed at first, buoyed along by the bubble of hope that bloomed with fierce intensity in your chest. Three days later and still no word, you remembered that single moment of hesitation between one sentence and the next. Four days later, you started checking your phone in between takes on set, just in case.

Five days later, and you're here, watching as late afternoon sunlight flows through the high rise windows and paints the clean white walls of Elle's office with celestial intensity. You shake your head, stand up and walk over to the aquarium behind her desk, watch the chorus of rainbow fish gliding in slow, tranquil circles around the tank. When you dip your fingertips into the water, they shoot up like stars to meet you, nipping curiously before descending again. 

The couch in the middle of the room is scarlet red and smooth, like a pouting mouth. Elle curls up on it expectantly, puts her chin in her hand. 

"Why are you so convinced it's hopeless?" she asks, "It's not like you."

"I have this theory," you say slowly. 

Elle gestures for you to go on.

"You won't like it," you warn her.

"Try me," she says.

You pause, ask yourself: dare I? Then you shake your head. 

"No, it's - it doesn't matter."

You circuit the coffee table as Elle watches you, keeping time with the rainbow fish. One of them breaks away from the others to fix you with a conspiratorial eye, as if listening in, then exhales a torrent of bubbles before swivelling back into the depths of the tank. The sheen of its scales tessellates from blue to violet and back again as it disappears.

"It's just that I used to have this feeling," you say. The words burst in the air like balloons. "I always used to have this feeling when I was with him."

"What feeling?"

"I can't name it, I just remember how it felt. It was like touching a live wire or - or diving into the sea on a hot day. That intensity, that...sting, you know? Sometimes I'd be on set, I'd be having a bad day, nothing would be working. So I would just take a sip from it, and it always made everything better. It made my characters better, it made me better. And I thought, this is what it will always be like, there will always be this...this sense that everything is just getting started. Like it's always spring."

"Oh, Timmy," Elle says softly.

You cover your eyes, squeeze so that you see bright starbursts wheeling over your vision for a moment after you let go.

"Sometimes I think I still feel it now. I go on set and have this moment where I can taste it on the tip of my tongue. But it's not the same, it can never be the same. It's like I'm always once removed, that...that disconnect, I guess. I can see it when I watch myself. And when I went into that audition, I think they saw it too."

Elle rushes to soothe you, to sweep away your doubts like dust on an empty shelf. But that night when sleep hides away, you stare up at your ceiling in the cool light of dawn and think about the calendar standing sentinel in the kitchen. The blurb beneath the picture begins brightly: Central Park is the heart of New York City. So often these days, you think about the word heart; how it is just one small syllable, and yet in your mind it always severs into two: he and art. Lately you think perhaps it does that because without him, you are slowly losing yours.

*

Evening in the city, fragrant with the scent of the flowers now blooming in abundance through the streets. A lavender twilight seduces the sun down from the sky as you watch the first stars crown through the open window behind him, framed by the wide span of his shoulders. He's taken off his watch, so you can see the clean white skin beneath his LA tan. Another soft space to adore.

"Those things you said on New Year's Eve..." you murmur.

The air has been hanging heavy and hard between you, weighted with the burden of things unsaid. Now you hear the shell of the silence splinter and break as he sits back when you speak, puts his glass down on the table. The look in his eyes is quiet and serious. It makes the blue more intense somehow, smoky in the way the sky becomes when the night bleeds in at its edges.

"Did you think about it?" he asks. 

"I think about it all the time," you say, "it's all I ever think about. And I tried, I really tried -"

You bite the words off against your lip, stare down at the white table cloth until the shimmering at the edges of your vision stops threatening to spill over. Seven days and still no word; seven days and the taste of failure hangs copper-thick and heavy in the back of your throat; seven days, and now somehow you must find the insurmountable words to say: I have asked and the world has denied me you again, again.

"Timmy," he says, "Listen to me."

He threads his fingers beneath the fine bracelets circuiting your wrist and holds them there as your heartbeat throbs against his touch, longing to free itself of the cage of your skin. Around you, the restaurant swells with light and sound and the rush of footsteps back and forth past your table. All those open eyes on you, and yet you can't bring yourself to pull away as he follows the path of a vein beneath his fingertips, soothes the tremor that starts in your hand with the reassuring heat of his skin.

"The reason I wanted to see you tonight..." he begins, trails off as you feel his heartbeat kick where your wrists are twined together.

"I wanted to tell you more at the Oscars, I swear I did," he says, "But everything was up in the air, I was waiting to hear back from all these casting calls and I just...I didn't want you to have false hope. I didn't want to put you through that, not again."

You dare to look up and meet his eyes, see the flush on his skin, rose gold and flickering in the muted candle-light. 

"I know you said you didn't want me to give everything up," he says, "and I haven't, I promise. And I know it's not everything, okay, it's not perfect. I still have to keep my place in LA, I'll still have to be there sometimes, and when these projects are over...there's no guarantee. But..."

He reaches into his pocket, holds the key up for a moment before he places it on the table in front of you. It seems to absorb all of the moonlight that floats in through the open windows, glowing as if with pride. You stretch out blindly, disbelieving, and trace the intricate angles of its design, unfamiliar beneath your fingertips. The expression on his face tells you that perhaps in time you will learn them.

"That's not - that's not the key to your house in LA," you whisper.

"No," he says softly, "That's the key to my apartment in New York."

*

You follow him up the winding staircase to his front door, your hands gliding one behind the other on the banister. The sound of the key in the lock is loud in the silence that has so far been broken only by your breathing. A silver pool of moonlight shimmers on the floor like an orb as he pushes the door open, then darts away playfully at the click of his fingers on the lamp switch. Over by the couch, the window sits ajar. You can smell the night flooding in, plush and alive with electricity.

Your phone is a lead weight, pulsing sluggishly in your pocket. You pry it out and set it down tentatively on the kitchen counter, catch his eye as you both look at it. On the walk over here you explained everything in fits and starts, timing sentences between the easy chatter of people walking past you and the uneven catch of your voice around words that threatened to choke. You could hear the doubt chiming like a bell in the centre of them, relentless. Now as you look at him, you can see that familiar hesitation in his eyes, that fear of the distance, of the miles, of the way it feels when you go to places where he cannot follow. He does his best to smile. 

"Let's not worry about it now," he says quietly.

You nod, pace over to the stem of the long hallway, where rooms branch off on both sides like the veins of a leaf. You look at them curiously, then circle back around to stand close to him as he pulls two coffee cups out of a box on the floor marked kitchen. 

"It's okay," he says, "I'll do this. You go and look around."

As you step past him, you walk your hand along the width of his back. Once that would have been a casual touch, aimless and easily bestowed, like the way you would graze his cheek with your thumb as you stood at the sink drying dishes together, just to see him stop and smile and close his eyes for a moment, whispering that feels nice. He doesn't do that now. Your circumstances have stolen casual away in the night, placed every glance behind a hidden door, imprinted every touch with a code to be turned around for clues in your mind like a rolling dice, never knowing which side it will land on. Still, he can't suppress the shiver that floods like a wave over his skin, lapping eagerly at the edges of your fingers. How you've missed being the cause of his effect.

You roam the apartment, flitting from one room to the next with unguarded curiosity. There are no paintings hanging on the walls yet; no pillows cushioning the window seat that will be the perfect place to sit and watch when the rain drifts like a veil over the city's skin. The bookshelves in the study are bare, lined only by the path of your fingertips as they trail along them; the glittering eye of the mirrored door on the bathroom cupboard blinks open to reveal an empty socket. No clothes hanging in the closet yet: a knock on its door delivers back a hollow echo like the sound of a hand clap in a cave. 

But in this house that is not yet a home, there is a picture, just one. It sits solemnly on the bedside table, in a simple wooden frame. It's not pretty, not designed to draw the eye with bright smiles or scenic views. Instead it's a strange picture, ungainly, of a tangled nest of branches caught under a bronzed halo of sun, the last rays of the day lending their golden touch to unexpected places. You remember this picture. You know this picture, because it is yours, your best light, from all those years ago. I told you it was stupid, you'd said to him in the drowsy evening air, and when he replied you heard that softness in his voice, newborn, like the tender shoot of a flower peeking up over the edges of the earth. No, he said, I don't think that at all. Then, weeks later, wading through the mess of half-packed suitcases in your apartment as you were both getting ready to leave, telling him, I can't find it anywhere, have you seen it? He'd looked up from where he was watching you in the doorway, framed by blazing sunlight, still in his Oliver clothes. The expression on his face was unreadable, but the sadness in his eyes had been rising with every day that brought you one step closer to saying goodbye. No, he'd said quietly, no idea, looked away as he tugged at the collar of his shirt. 

You take the picture in your hand and slip it free of its frame, bring it up to your face for a moment and breathe it in for the slightest trace of the endless sun, for the scent of the walls of the villa when they were warmed by the cloudless blue skies, for the sound of his laughter when he spoke with you in the moonlit gardens late at night, surrounded by the winding trees hanging heavy with ripe fruit and the sultry air always burning with the rising fire between you. Then you think about your phone in its hateful, stubborn slumber, how perhaps it will freeze you in amber forever if you wait to have your fate decided. He's been brave enough to let you go, but maybe you're the one who's brave enough to choose the pain instead, to hold on and say, if I ache then I must feel it in your arms, if I have to be taken apart then it must be by your hands, if I need to suffocate then it is only you who can have my air.

You hear footsteps in the doorway and for just a moment as you turn towards him, you're fifteen again. You're standing alone in the hushed gallery of the Met, gazing up at the marble statues towering around you in all of their carved ivory perfection, their skin taut and unblemished, their stance strong and tall, and you're thinking, men like that don't happen to boys like me. And yet there he was, waiting in the wings all along until you were sitting in that tiny, hot room with the sound of the piano spilling like syrup beneath your fingertips as you learned to play, until the door opened and filled immediately with light, with skin, with him, until even as the villa seemed to shrink down smaller and smaller around you with the wonder of his arrival, your world unravelled at its edges and became infinitely bigger, better, more. 

He sinks down on the edge of the bed, takes the picture from your hand and turns it slowly over in his. He can't look at you as you kneel down in front of him, rest your arm over his knee. You think about him keeping that picture all these years, making do, holding it when you're not around to try and fill the void of your absence. One look at his face and you don't have to ask to know that it's been a poor substitute.

"Armie," you say.

You say his name because at last you know it's yours to say, because it's been stitched in the nape of your soul all along. He bites his lip, shakes his head because he doesn't trust himself to speak. Tears shimmer like diamonds alongside the jewel blue of his eyes. You realise that in all this time, you've never once seen him cry. He was always too busy trying to take care of things, trying to be good enough, strong enough.

"Maybe I never get that call," you say quietly. You lift his hand from his thigh and hold it in yours, feel the way you fit together because however hard the world might try, some things never change. "Maybe in a few months when you finish these projects you can't find any more in New York and you wind up back in LA, or London, or anywhere that I'm not. Maybe every time I see you walk towards me a part of me is already thinking about the moment when you have to walk away. Maybe you and me always hurt a little bit when we try to be an us. Maybe we never get to do this like ordinary people."

The first tears fall hot and heavy on your twined hands, the way the first drops of rain hit the sidewalk, absolving the swollen clouds above of their burden. That wiry purr of relief that courses through the air when the lightning flashes electric in the sky; now you feel it in this room. 

"All of those things might happen," you say, "or none of them, or some. And either way it won't matter, because if I have to make compromises, if I have to keep choosing you over the next job, if I have to say no sometimes, I will do it, I will do it and I won't regret it. Because I have to be with you. I have to be with you, and you have to be with me."

Time to come in from the cold.

In your arms at last he folds into you, folds into himself; in your arms he lets the levee break. He cries, a quiet flood of tears now that soaks your t-shirt and shakes his body as the night flows velvet-soft and steady into the corners of this room. Love is such easy art under endless blue skies, but to love him through the storm; now you love him better, now you love him best. That's why you don't try to stop him, don't try to rush his pain away, push it out of sight so you don't have to feel the way it aches or see what being brave has cost him. What you have together is strong; it doesn't run and hide from the parts that aren't pretty.

Instead you hold his hands, those hands that are so big and yet have always touched you so gently, and known you so well, and only ever pushed you away to try and keep you safe. You stroke his hair where it curls just behind his ear, brush the cobwebs of grief away from his skin with the tips of your fingers. He's wearing the silver chain necklace you bought him, the one you loved because it looked so fragile against his skin, glittering as it trickled inside the strong frame of his shoulders like a waterfall around a mountainside. When you reach to unfasten it he bows his head to let you, shows you the delicate hollow just above his spine. You stroke it as the necklace pools in the palm of your hand. Then you kiss the inside of his neck, slowly, following the imprint of the chain that trails like the echo of footsteps over sand. Under your lips, his blood stirs, his senses unroll like a red carpet to greet your royal touch on the empire of his skin. Nerves switch back on like the banks of lights in a stadium as your kisses lean down to rouse them from their long cold slumber, to whisper in their ear, wake up, you've slept long enough, it is spring again; you and I, we must begin again.

Tears cling to his eyelashes when he pulls back to look at you, so close that you can see them shiver with every blink. You lean in to share his breath, to lend him yours when he is short of his own. I have missed the way you kiss me, he whispers, loses the last word against your mouth. The arch of his Cupid's bow tastes of salt, then later, as the night unfolds, only of you, always of you. And maybe the passing of this year apart has tried to steal away some of the secrets of his skin from your mind, but here in this bed, your body; your body remembers everything.

*

Time has taught you some hard lessons. Miss your cue by a minute or your mark by a mile; either way, just when you think you've found your path, life takes you by the hand and leads you astray. The seasons change, the curtain falls, the words that once blossomed so freely wither to dust on the vine and suddenly there is no alchemy in this world or the next that can push back the hands of the clock. Faces fade into the distance, voices once so familiar are lost to the echo of themselves; the train pulls away from the platform and forever carries part of you along with it.

Sometimes life tells stories that are sad without end. But yours is not such a story.

It's morning now. No rain fell beyond the limits of this room last night, yet still the city seems to sense the passing of a storm. Sunrise came quietly, like a candle lit at the corner of the night that caught and burned to bright flames, and now this day flows soft and molasses-slow, carried along in the arms of the clear skies above. You lie together with your body cocooned in his, bare skin bathed in the rays of the sun as they pour through the window. Part of you thought this might feel new again, but it doesn't: the slow thud of his heartbeat against your back, the precise warmth his skin induces in yours, the way the world looks infinitely softer and inviting when you turn in his arms and view it from behind the crest of his shoulder; all is familiar, all is home. 

Your phone lies on the bedside table, where it has been since its metallic buzzing summoned you to the kitchen this morning, dressed in only his shirt; since you held it to your ear and for the first few seconds heard only your heart because it was beating so loudly. Since you climbed back into bed with him drowsy and silk-smooth beneath you and whispered, guess what?, watched that bright, sunshine smile break over his face, the one you hadn't seen in far too long. Soon there will be calls to make, new faces to meet, lines to learn, but not today. Today you have nowhere to be, nothing to do, no roles to play. No teeth to fear the stinging bite of. Just the curve of his mouth, settled into the ghost of a smile even in sleep.

He wakes now though, stirring gently behind you. One hand raises from where it rests protectively around your waist as he sorts through your curls carefully, one at a time. Every once in a while, he unwinds them around his fingertips, kisses them, lets them spring free again.

"What're you doing?" you whisper curiously, smiling.

"Saying hi to all my favourites," he tells you. He reaches forward and twines his fingertips through the curl that always falls in your eyes at the front, no matter what you try.

"Now this one is more than just a favourite," he says. His voice is a deep, comforting purr against your back. "This one is a Queen amongst curls..."

You both laugh. You remember that he could always make you laugh, even in your worst moments, but this isn't a worst moment at all, not any more. You lean back to kiss him, nuzzle into the long line of his throat where you can feel the pleasing rasp of his stubble, longer there than the rest where he missed it shaving the day before, the way he always does. The way he always will. You smile.

"Don't make me lose my place," he says sternly, "or I'll have to start again."

You steal one last kiss and then settle back in his arms, close your eyes to savour the warmth glowing on your skin. Dust dances in the sun beams ahead of you, lazy and unhurried. The minutes tick by as you bask in the luxury of his touch like a cat curled on a windowsill. 

"It feels like this might take a while," you tease sleepily.

He smooths your hair away from your skin, presses a constellation of kisses into the curve of your neck until his voice is a private whisper in your ear. You can hear the smile in his voice when he speaks.

"Maybe," he says, "but we have time."

Finis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may well come back and visit these two every so often - they've been with me every day for most of this year, and I don't feel quite ready to say goodbye! Having said that, I also miss writing their fictional counterparts Elio and Oliver, so watch this space :)
> 
> I have absolutely loved sharing this story with you guys. Still, there were many moments where I was pretty terrified that I had bitten off way more than my writing skills could chew - second person, angsty, break up theme; you name it, I'd never done it before. I don't think I really believed I could finish it until I wrote the very last line, and I would definitely never have got there without all of your encouragement and support. So whether you read, commented, left kudos, bookmarked or subscribed - thank you, thank you, thank you. Very much. All the time :) xxx


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